Nick proposed years ago that tmpfs should avoid clearing its pages where
write will overwrite them with new data, as ramfs has long done. But I
messed it up and just got bad data. Tried again recently, it works
fine.
Here's time output for writing 4GiB 16 times on this Core i5 laptop:
before: real 0m21.169s user 0m0.028s sys 0m21.057s
real 0m21.382s user 0m0.016s sys 0m21.289s
real 0m21.311s user 0m0.020s sys 0m21.217s
after: real 0m18.273s user 0m0.032s sys 0m18.165s
real 0m18.354s user 0m0.020s sys 0m18.265s
real 0m18.440s user 0m0.032s sys 0m18.337s
ramfs: real 0m16.860s user 0m0.028s sys 0m16.765s
real 0m17.382s user 0m0.040s sys 0m17.273s
real 0m17.133s user 0m0.044s sys 0m17.021s
Yes, I have done perf reports, but they need more explanation than they
deserve: in summary, clear_page vanishes, its cache loading shifts into
copy_user_generic_unrolled; shmem_getpage_gfp goes down, and
surprisingly mark_page_accessed goes way up - I think because they are
respectively where the cache gets to be reloaded after being purged by
clear or copy.
Change-Id: I3f32de9543820c0c827e7e89b3481e4fe6670dff
Suggested-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Hugh Dickins
4dc6510655