i386/68719: [usb] USB 2.0 mobil rack+ fat32 performance problem

[Bruce Evans]

The following reply was made to PR i386/68719; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Bruce Evans" <bde at zeta.org.au>
To: <james>
Cc: <freebsd-fs at FreeBSD.org>,
	<freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org>,
	<banhalmi at field.hu>
Subject: Re: i386/68719: [usb] USB 2.0 mobil rack+ fat32 performance problem
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 05:30:20 +0100

 On Mon, 30 May 2005, Dominic Marks wrote:
 
 > On Monday 30 May 2005 11:11, Bruce Evans wrote:
 >> The main problem is that VOP_BMAP() is not fully implemented for msdosfs.
 >> msdosfs_bmap() only has a stub which pretends that clustering ins never
 >> possible:
 >
 > If I understand what is supposed to be done here (I looked at cd9660 but
 > I don't know if the rules are different from msdos), a_runp should be set
 > to the extent of contiguous blocks from the current position within the
 > same region? I put some debugging into msdosfs_bmap and here it is copied:
 
 cd9660 is deceptively simple here because (I think) it allocates files
 in perfectly contiguous extents.
 
 msdosfs, ffs^ufs and ext2fs have to do considerable work to map even a
 single block.  The details are in pcbmap() for msdosfs.  (The name of this
 function dates from when msdosfs was named pcfs.)  I think msdosfs_bmap()
 just needs to call this function for each block following the start block
 until a discontiguity is hit or a limit (*) is reached.
 
 ufs and ext2fs have an optimized and obfucsated version of this, with
 multiple blocks looked up at once and the single-block lookup implemented
 as a multiple-block lookup with a count of 1.  I doubt that this
 optimization is significant even for ufs, at least now that CPUs are
 10 to 100 times as fast relative to I/O as when it was implemented.
 However it is easier to optimize for msdosfs since there are no
 indirect blocks.
 
 All of cd9660, ufs and ext2fs have a whole file *_bmap.c for bmapping.
 ext2_bmaparray() is simplest, but bmapping in ext2fs and ufs is so
 similar that misspelling ext2_getlbns() as ufs_getlbns() in 1 caller
 is harmless.
 
 (*) The correct limit is mnt_iosize_max bytes.  cd9660 uses the wrong
 limit of MAXBSIZE.
 
 > (fsz is dep->de_FileSize)
 >
 > msdosfs_bmap: fsz  81047  blkno  6374316  lblkno 5
 > ...
 > msdosfs_bmap: fsz  81047  blkno  6374364  lblkno 11
 > msdosfs_bmap: fsz  81047  blkno  6374372  lblkno 12 # A1
 > msdosfs_bmap: fsz  81047  blkno 13146156  lblkno 13 # A2
 > msdosfs_bmap: fsz  81047  blkno 13146156  lblkno 14
 > ...
 >
 > I should compute the position of the boundary illustrated in A1 I should set
 > that to the read ahead value, until setting a new value at A2, perhaps this
 > should only be done for particularly large files? I will look at the other
 > _bmap routines to see what they do.
 
 Better to do it for all files.  For small files there are just fewer
 blocks to check for contiguity.
 
 > I am still confused as to how reading blsize * 16 actually improved
 > the transfer rate after a long period of making it worse. Perhaps it
 > is related to the buffer resource problem you describe below.
 
 Could be.  The buffer cache layer doesn't handle either overlapping
 buffers or variant buffer sizes very well.  Buffer sizes of (blsize *
 16) mixed with buffer sizes of blsize for msdosfs and 16K for ffs may
 excercise both of these.
 
 Bruce
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