diff options
| author | Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> | 2026-09-14 22:12:34 -1000 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> | 2026-09-15 06:57:20 -1000 |
| commit | a9e3760b0838299649c0d57cca44daaf40ba3c33 (patch) | |
| tree | 95807ff0e511c05602ef34808cfc660303309057 /Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst | |
| download | linux-stable-a9e3760b0838299649c0d57cca44daaf40ba3c33.tar.gz linux-stable-a9e3760b0838299649c0d57cca44daaf40ba3c33.zip | |
sched_ext: Maintain an online cid mask in the scheduler arenagrafted
Schedulers on the default cid mapping treat [0, nr_online_cids) as the
online set and restart on hotplug. Schedulers that install their own mapping
with scx_bpf_cid_override() have no way to learn which cids are online: the
count no longer identifies members and the CPU-form cpumask is unusable from
cid programs. This is an obvious hole in the cid API.
Add scx_bpf_online_cmask(), a kernel-maintained cmask in the scheduler's
arena, allocated alongside the per-CPU scratch masks and populated after the
cid mapping is finalized and before ops.init(), for child schedulers too.
The pointer stays valid through ops.exit() with no reference to take. It is
the arena offset as a void pointer, the same form struct_ops arena arguments
arrive in. The verifier types the void return as a scalar for the program's
arena cast.
The mask follows the SCX hotplug notifications: seeded from cpu_active_mask
and updated before ops.cid_online/offline() runs, so it lags cpu_online_mask
only inside a hotplug transition. Updates walk the scheduler list under the
lock that also serializes unlinking. Reads are live, not atomic snapshots.
Root initialization excludes hotplug.
v2: Reworded the getter kerneldoc (Andrea Righi).
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Andrea Righi <arighi@nvidia.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst | 34 |
1 files changed, 34 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000..976a180b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/bigalloc.rst @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 + +Bigalloc +-------- + +At the moment, the default size of a block is 4KiB, which is a commonly +supported page size on most MMU-capable hardware. This is fortunate, as +ext4 code is not prepared to handle the case where the block size +exceeds the page size. However, for a filesystem of mostly huge files, +it is desirable to be able to allocate disk blocks in units of multiple +blocks to reduce both fragmentation and metadata overhead. The +bigalloc feature provides exactly this ability. + +The bigalloc feature (EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_BIGALLOC) changes ext4 to +use clustered allocation, so that each bit in the ext4 block allocation +bitmap addresses a power of two number of blocks. For example, if the +file system is mainly going to be storing large files in the 4-32 +megabyte range, it might make sense to set a cluster size of 1 megabyte. +This means that each bit in the block allocation bitmap now addresses +256 4k blocks. This shrinks the total size of the block allocation +bitmaps for a 2T file system from 64 megabytes to 256 kilobytes. It also +means that a block group addresses 32 gigabytes instead of 128 megabytes, +also shrinking the amount of file system overhead for metadata. + +The administrator can set a block cluster size at mkfs time (which is +stored in the s_log_cluster_size field in the superblock); from then +on, the block bitmaps track clusters, not individual blocks. This means +that block groups can be several gigabytes in size (instead of just +128MiB); however, the minimum allocation unit becomes a cluster, not a +block, even for directories. TaoBao had a patchset to extend the “use +units of clusters instead of blocks” to the extent tree, though it is +not clear where those patches went-- they eventually morphed into +“extent tree v2” but that code has not landed as of May 2015. + |
