Adding upstream version 5.10.209.upstream/5.10.209upstream

Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>

1 files changed, 56 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/allocators.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/allocators.rst
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+Block and Inode Allocation Policy
+---------------------------------
+
+ext4 recognizes (better than ext3, anyway) that data locality is
+generally a desirably quality of a filesystem. On a spinning disk,
+keeping related blocks near each other reduces the amount of movement
+that the head actuator and disk must perform to access a data block,
+thus speeding up disk IO. On an SSD there of course are no moving parts,
+but locality can increase the size of each transfer request while
+reducing the total number of requests. This locality may also have the
+effect of concentrating writes on a single erase block, which can speed
+up file rewrites significantly. Therefore, it is useful to reduce
+fragmentation whenever possible.
+
+The first tool that ext4 uses to combat fragmentation is the multi-block
+allocator. When a file is first created, the block allocator
+speculatively allocates 8KiB of disk space to the file on the assumption
+that the space will get written soon. When the file is closed, the
+unused speculative allocations are of course freed, but if the
+speculation is correct (typically the case for full writes of small
+files) then the file data gets written out in a single multi-block
+extent. A second related trick that ext4 uses is delayed allocation.
+Under this scheme, when a file needs more blocks to absorb file writes,
+the filesystem defers deciding the exact placement on the disk until all
+the dirty buffers are being written out to disk. By not committing to a
+particular placement until it's absolutely necessary (the commit timeout
+is hit, or sync() is called, or the kernel runs out of memory), the hope
+is that the filesystem can make better location decisions.
+
+The third trick that ext4 (and ext3) uses is that it tries to keep a
+file's data blocks in the same block group as its inode. This cuts down
+on the seek penalty when the filesystem first has to read a file's inode
+to learn where the file's data blocks live and then seek over to the
+file's data blocks to begin I/O operations.
+
+The fourth trick is that all the inodes in a directory are placed in the
+same block group as the directory, when feasible. The working assumption
+here is that all the files in a directory might be related, therefore it
+is useful to try to keep them all together.
+
+The fifth trick is that the disk volume is cut up into 128MB block
+groups; these mini-containers are used as outlined above to try to
+maintain data locality. However, there is a deliberate quirk -- when a
+directory is created in the root directory, the inode allocator scans
+the block groups and puts that directory into the least heavily loaded
+block group that it can find. This encourages directories to spread out
+over a disk; as the top-level directory/file blobs fill up one block
+group, the allocators simply move on to the next block group. Allegedly
+this scheme evens out the loading on the block groups, though the author
+suspects that the directories which are so unlucky as to land towards
+the end of a spinning drive get a raw deal performance-wise.
+
+Of course if all of these mechanisms fail, one can always use e4defrag
+to defragment files.