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Btrfs Allocator Hints

https://lwn.net/ml/all/cover.1747070147.git.anand.jain@oracle.com/
23•forza_user•2d ago

Comments

forza_user•2d ago
I was surprised of the new attempt for performance profiles/device roles/hints when we already have a very good patch set maintained by kakra.

- https://github.com/kakra/linux/pull/36

- https://wiki.tnonline.net/w/Btrfs/Allocator_Hints

What do you think?

dontdoxxme•4h ago
> One of the reasons why these patches are not included in the kernel is that the free space calculations do not work properly.

It seems these patches possibly fix that.

bjoli•3h ago
I wonder if I can use a smaller SSD for this and make it avoid HDD wakeups due to some process reading metadata. That alone would make me love this feature.
bionade24•2h ago
Most likely yes, but the also envisioned periodically repacking oft multiple small data extents into one big that gets written to the HDD would wake up the HDD. And if you'd make the SSD "metadata only", browser cache and logging will keep the HDD spinning.

This feature is for performance, not the case you described.

the8472•1h ago
I think you'd rather want a cache device (or some more complicated storage tiering) for that so that both metadata and frequently accessed files get moved to that dynamically based on access patterns. Afaik btrfs doesn't support that. LVM, bcache, device mapper, bcachefs and zfs support that (though zfs would require separate caches for reading and synchronous write). And idk which of these let you control the writeback interval.
ajross•57m ago
Just buy more RAM and you get that for free. Really I guess that's my sense of patches like this in general: while sure, filesystem research has a long and storied history and it's a very hard problem in general that attracts some of the smartest people in the field to do genius-tier work...

Does it really matter in the modern world where a vanilla two-socket rack unit has a terabyte of DRAM? Everything at scale happens in RAM these days. Everything. Replicating across datacenters gets you all the reliability you need, with none of the fussing about storage latency and block device I/O strategy.

homebrewer•30m ago
> Does it really matter in the modern world

Considering that multiple ZFS developers get paid to make ZFS work well on petabyte-sized disk arrays with SSD caching, and one of them often reports on progress in this area in his podcasts (2.5admins.com and bsdnow if you're interested) .. then yes?

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