d38a9c04c0
Currently we scan the entire plug list, which is potentially very expensive. In an IOPS bound workload, we can drive about 5.6M IOPS with merging enabled, and profiling shows that the plug merge check is the (by far) most expensive thing we're doing: Overhead Command Shared Object Symbol + 20.89% io_uring [kernel.vmlinux] [k] blk_attempt_plug_merge + 4.98% io_uring [kernel.vmlinux] [k] io_submit_sqes + 4.78% io_uring [kernel.vmlinux] [k] blkdev_direct_IO + 4.61% io_uring [kernel.vmlinux] [k] blk_mq_submit_bio Instead of browsing the whole list, just check the previously inserted entry. That is enough for a naive merge check and will catch most cases, and for devices that need full merging, the IO scheduler attached to such devices will do that anyway. The plug merge is meant to be an inexpensive check to avoid getting a request, but if we repeatedly scan the list for every single insert, it is very much not a cheap check. With this patch, the workload instead runs at ~7.0M IOPS, providing a 25% improvement. Disabling merging entirely yields another 5% improvement. Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.