Disclaimer :
The original version of this article was first published on IBM
developerWorks, and is property of Westtech Information Services. This
document is an updated version of the original article, and contains
various improvements made by the Gentoo Linux Documentation team.
This document is not actively maintained.
|
Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Part 8
1. Introduction
I'm going to be honest. For this article, I was planning to show you how to get
ext3 up and running on your system. Although that's what I said I'd do, I'm not
going to do it. Andrew Morton's excellent "Using the ext3 filesystem in 2.4
kernels" page (see Resources later in this
article) already does a great job of explaining how to ext3-enable your system,
so there's no need for me to repeat all the basics here. Instead, I'm going to
delve into some meatier ext3 topics, ones that I think you'll find very useful.
After you read this article, when you're ready to get ext3 up and running, head
over to Andrew's page.
2. 2.4 kernel update
First, let's start with a 2.4 kernel update. I last discussed 2.4 kernel
stability when I was covering ReiserFS. Way back then, finding a stable 2.4
kernel was a challenge, and I recommended sticking with the known and at that
time bleeding-edge 2.4.4-ac9 kernel -- especially for anyone planning to use
the ReiserFS filesystem in a production environment. As you might guess, a lot
has happened since 2.4.4-ac9, and it's definitely time to start looking at
newer kernels.
With kernel 2.4.10, the 2.4 series reached a new level of performance and
scalability (something that we've been anticipating for a long time). So, what
happened to allow Linux 2.4 to finally grow up? In an acronym, VM. Linus,
recognizing that the 2.4 series wasn't performing spectacularly, ripped out
Linux's problematic VM code and replaced it with a lean and mean VM
implementation from Andrea Archangeli. Andrea's new VM implementation (which
first appeared in 2.4.10) was really great; it really sped up the kernel and
made the entire system more responsive. 2.4.10 was definitely a major turning
point in 2.4 Linux kernel development; up until then, things weren't looking
very good, and many of us were wondering why we weren't FreeBSD developers. We
all should thank Linus for his heroism in making such a major (but sorely
needed) change in the 2.4 stable kernel series.
Since Andrea's new VM code needed a bit of time to be integrated seamlessly
with the rest of the kernel, use 2.4.13+. Even better, use 2.4.16+, since the
rock-solid ext3 filesystem code was finally integrated into the official Linus
kernel starting with the 2.4.15-pre2 release. There's no reason to avoid using
2.4.16+ kernel, and it'll make your job of getting ext3 up and running that
much easier. If you do use a 2.4.16+ kernel, just remember that it's no longer
necessary to apply the ext3 patch as described on Andrew's page (see Resources). Linus already added it for you. :)
You'll notice that I recommend using 2.4.16+ rather than 2.4.15+, and with good
reason. With the release of kernel 2.4.15-pre9, a really ugly filesystem
corruption bug was introduced to the kernel. It took until 2.4.16-pre1 for the
problem to be identified and fixed, resulting in a span of kernels (including
2.4.15) that should be avoided at all costs. Choosing a 2.4.16+ kernel allows
you to avoid this bad batch entirely.
3. Laptops...beware?
Ext3 has a stellar reputation for being a rock-solid filesystem, so I was
surprised to learn that quite a few laptop users were having filesystem
corruption problems when they switched to ext3. In general, it's tempting to
react to these kinds of reports by avoiding ext3 entirely; however, after
asking around, I discovered that the disk corruption problems that people were
experiencing had nothing to do with ext3 itself, but were being caused by
certain laptop hard drives.
The write cache
You may not know this, but most modern hard drives have something called a
"write cache", used by the hard drive to collect pending write operations. By
putting pending writes into a cache, the hard drive firmware can then reorder
and group them so that they're written to disk in the fastest possible way.
The write cache is generally considered to be a very good thing (read Linus'
explanation and opinion of write caching in Resources).
Unfortunately, certain laptop hard drives now on the market have the dubious
feature of ignoring any official ATA request to flush their write cache to
disk. This isn't a wonderful design feature, although it has been allowed by
the ATA spec up until recently. With these types of drives, there's no way for
the kernel to guarantee that a particular block has actually been recorded to
the disk platters. Although this sounds like a thorny problem, this particular
issue by itself is probably not the cause of the data corruption problems that
people have been experiencing.
However, it gets worse. Some modern laptop hard drives have an even nastier
habit of throwing away their write cache whenever the system is rebooted or
suspended. Obviously, if a hard drive has both of these problems, it's going to
regularly corrupt data, and there's nothing that Linux can do to prevent it
from doing so.
So, what's the solution? If you have a laptop, tread carefully. Back up all
your important files before making any major change to your filesystems. If you
experience data corruption problems that seem to fit the pattern of what I
described above, particularly with ext3, then remember that it may be your
laptop hard drive that's at fault. In that case, you may want to contact your
laptop manufacturer and inquire about getting a replacement drive. Hopefully,
in a few months time, these flaky hard drives will be pulled from the market
and we'll never need to worry about this issue again.
Now that I've scared you out of your minds, let's take a look at ext3's various
data journaling options.
4. Journaling options and write latency
Ext3 allows you to choose from one of three data journaling modes at filesystem
mount time: data=writeback, data=ordered, and data=journal.
To specify a journal mode, you can add the appropriate string (data=journal,
for example) to the options section of your /etc/fstab, or specify the -o
data=journal command-line option when calling mount directly. If you'd like to
specify the data journaling method used for your root filesystem (data=ordered
is the default), you can to use a special kernel boot option called rootflags.
So, if you'd like to put your root filesystem into full data journaling mode,
add rootflags=data=journal to your kernel boot options.
data=writeback mode
In data=writeback mode, ext3 doesn't do any form of data journaling at all,
providing you with similar journaling found in the XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS
filesystems (metadata only). As I explained in my previous
article, this could allow recently modified files to become corrupted in
the event of an unexpected reboot. Despite this drawback, data=writeback mode
should give you the best ext3 performance under most conditions.
data=ordered mode
In data=ordered mode, ext3 only officially journals metadata, but it logically
groups metadata and data blocks into a single unit called a transaction. When
it's time to write the new metadata out to disk, the associated data blocks are
written first. data=ordered mode effectively solves the corruption problem
found in data=writeback mode and most other journaled filesystems, and it does
so without requiring full data journaling. In general, data=ordered ext3
filesystems perform slightly slower than data=writeback filesystems, but
significantly faster than their full data journaling counterparts.
When appending data to files, data=ordered mode provides all of the integrity
guarantees offered by ext3's full data journaling mode. However, if part of a
file is being overwritten and the system crashes, it's possible that the region
being written will contain a combination of original blocks interspersed with
updated blocks. This is because data=ordered provides no guarantees as to which
blocks are overwritten first, so you can't assume that just because overwritten
block x was updated, that overwritten block x-1 was updated as well. Instead,
data=ordered leaves the write ordering up to the hard drive's write cache. In
general, this limitation doesn't end up negatively impacting people very often,
since file appends are generally much more common than file overwrites. For
this reason, data=ordered mode is a good higher-performance replacement for
full data journaling.
data=journal mode
data=journal mode provides full data and metadata journaling. All new data is
written to the journal first, and then to its final location. In the event of a
crash, the journal can be replayed, bringing both data and metadata into a
consistent state.
Theoretically, data=journal mode is the slowest journaling mode of all, since
data gets written to disk twice rather than once. However, it turns out that in
certain situations, data=journal mode can be blazingly fast. Andrew Morton,
after hearing reports on LKML that ext3 data=journal filesystems were giving
people unbelievably great interactive filesystem performance, decided to put
together a little test. First, he created simple shell script designed to write
data to a test filesystem as quickly as possible:
Code Listing 4.1: Rapid writing |
while true
do
dd if=/dev/zero of=largefile bs=16384 count=131072
done
|
While data was being written to the test filesystem, he attempted to read
16MB of data from another ext2 filesystem on the same disk, timing the
results:
Code Listing 4.2: Reading a 16MB file |
$ time cat 16-meg-file > /dev/null
|
The results were astounding. data=journal mode allowed the 16-meg-file to be
read from 9 to over 13 times faster than other ext3 modes, ReiserFS, and even
ext2 (which has no journaling overhead):
Written-to-filesystem |
16-meg-read-time (seconds) |
ext2 |
78 |
ReiserFS |
67 |
ext3 data=ordered |
93 |
ext3 data=writeback |
74 |
ext3 data=journal |
7 |
Andrew repeated this test, but tried to read a 16MB file from the test
filesystem (rather than a different filesystem), and he got identical results.
So, what does this mean? Somehow, ext3's data=journal mode is incredibly
well-suited to situations where data needs to be read from and written to disk
at the same time. Therefore, ext3's data=journal mode, which was assumed to be
the slowest of all ext3 modes in nearly all conditions, actually turns out to
have a major performance advantage in busy environments where interactive IO
performance needs to be maximized. Maybe data=journal mode isn't so sluggish
after all!
Andrew is still trying to figure out exactly why data=journal mode is doing so
much better than everything else. When he does, he may be able to add the
necessary tweaks to the rest of ext3 so that data=writeback and data=ordered
modes see some benefit as well.
5. data=journal tweaks
Some people have had a particular performance problem when using ext3's
data=journal mode on busy servers -- busy NFS servers, in particular. Every
thirty seconds, the server experiences a huge storm of disk-writing activity,
causing the system to nearly grind to a halt. If you experience this problem,
it's easy to fix. Simply type the following command as root to tweak Linux's
dirty buffer-flushing algorithm:
Code Listing 5.1: Tweaking bdflush |
$ echo 40 0 0 0 60 300 60 0 0 > /proc/sys/vm/bdflush
|
These new bdflush settings will cause kupdate to run every 0.6 seconds rather
than every 5 seconds. In addition, they tell the kernel to flush a dirty buffer
after 3 seconds rather than 30, the default. By flushing recently-modified data
to disk more regularly, these write storms can be avoided. It's slightly less
efficient to do things this way, since the kernel will have fewer opportunities
to combine writes. But for a busy server, writes will happen more consistently,
and interactive performance will be greatly improved.
6. Conclusion
We've now concluded our coverage of ext3. Join me in my next article as we
explore the many wonders of... XFS!
7. Resources
|