v3: s-o-b comment, explanation of performance and descision for
the start/stop implementation
Implementing rmw functionality for RAID6 requires optimized syndrome
calculation. Up to now we can only generate a complete syndrome. The
target P/Q pages are always overwritten. With this patch we provide
a framework for inplace P/Q modification. In the first place simply
fill those functions with NULL values.
xor_syndrome() has two additional parameters: start & stop. These
will indicate the first and last page that are changing during a
rmw run. That makes it possible to avoid several unneccessary loops
and speed up calculation. The caller needs to implement the following
logic to make the functions work.
1) xor_syndrome(disks, start, stop, ...): "Remove" all data of source
blocks inside P/Q between (and including) start and end.
2) modify any block with start <= block <= stop
3) xor_syndrome(disks, start, stop, ...): "Reinsert" all data of
source blocks into P/Q between (and including) start and end.
Pages between start and stop that won't be changed should be filled
with a pointer to the kernel zero page. The reasons for not taking NULL
pages are:
1) Algorithms cross the whole source data line by line. Thus avoid
additional branches.
2) Having a NULL page avoids calculating the XOR P parity but still
need calulation steps for the Q parity. Depending on the algorithm
unrolling that might be only a difference of 2 instructions per loop.
The benchmark numbers of the gen_syndrome() functions are displayed in
the kernel log. Do the same for the xor_syndrome() functions. This
will help to analyze performance problems and give an rough estimate
how well the algorithm works. The choice of the fastest algorithm will
still depend on the gen_syndrome() performance.
With the start/stop page implementation the speed can vary a lot in real
life. E.g. a change of page 0 & page 15 on a stripe will be harder to
compute than the case where page 0 & page 1 are XOR candidates. To be not
to enthusiatic about the expected speeds we will run a worse case test
that simulates a change on the upper half of the stripe. So we do:
1) calculation of P/Q for the upper pages
2) continuation of Q for the lower (empty) pages
Signed-off-by: Markus Stockhausen <stockhausen@collogia.de>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
This change adds TILE-Gx SIMD instructions to the software raid
(md), modeling the Altivec implementation. This is only for Syndrome
generation; there is more that could be done to improve recovery,
as in the recent Intel SSE3 recovery implementation.
The code unrolls 8 times; this turns out to be the best on tilegx
hardware among the set 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16. The code reads one
cache-line of data from each disk, stores P and Q then goes to the
next cache-line.
The test code in sys/linux/lib/raid6/test reports 2008 MB/s data
read rate for syndrome generation using 18 disks (16 data and 2
parity). It was 1512 MB/s before this SIMD optimizations. This is
running on 1 core with all the data in cache.
This is based on the paper The Mathematics of RAID-6.
(http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hpa/raid6.pdf).
Signed-off-by: Ken Steele <ken@tilera.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@tilera.com>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Markus Stockhausen