Due to user writes being decoupled from media writes because of the need
of an intermediate write buffer, irrecoverable media write errors lead
to pblk stalling; user writes fill up the buffer and end up in an
infinite retry loop.
In order to let user writes fail gracefully, it is necessary for pblk to
keep track of its own internal state and prevent further writes from
being placed into the write buffer.
This patch implements a state machine to keep track of internal errors
and, in case of failure, fail further user writes in an standard way.
Depending on the type of error, pblk will do its best to persist
buffered writes (which are already acknowledged) and close down on a
graceful manner. This way, data might be recovered by re-instantiating
pblk. Such state machine paves out the way for a state-based FTL log.
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
At the moment, in order to get enough read parallelism, we have recycled
several lines at the same time. This approach has proven not to work
well when reaching capacity, since we end up mixing valid data from all
lines, thus not maintaining a sustainable free/recycled line ratio.
The new design, relies on a two level workqueue mechanism. In the first
level, we read the metadata for a number of lines based on the GC list
they reside on (this is governed by the number of valid sectors in each
line). In the second level, we recycle a single line at a time. Here, we
issue reads in parallel, while a single GC write thread places data in
the write buffer. This design allows to (i) only move data from one line
at a time, thus maintaining a sane free/recycled ration and (ii)
maintain the GC writer busy with recycled data.
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
After refactoring the metadata path, the backpointer controlling
synced I/Os in a line becomes unnecessary; metadata is scheduled
on the write thread, thus we know when the end of the line is reached
and act on it directly.
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Remove a legacy variable that helped verifying the consistency of the
run-time metadata for the free line list. With the new metadata layout,
this check is no longer necessary.
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
At the moment, line metadata is persisted on a separate work queue, that
is kicked each time that a line is closed. The assumption when designing
this was that freeing the write thread from creating a new write request
was better than the potential impact of writes colliding on the media
(user I/O and metadata I/O). Experimentation has proven that this
assumption is wrong; collision can cause up to 25% of bandwidth and
introduce long tail latencies on the write thread, which potentially
cause user write threads to spend more time spinning to get a free entry
on the write buffer.
This patch moves the metadata logic to the write thread. When a line is
closed, remaining metadata is written in memory and is placed on a
metadata queue. The write thread then takes the metadata corresponding
to the previous line, creates the write request and schedules it to
minimize collisions on the media. Using this approach, we see that we
can saturate the media's bandwidth, which helps reducing both write
latencies and the spinning time for user writer threads.
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Allow to configure the number of maximum sectors per write command
through sysfs. This makes it easier to tune write command sizes for
different controller configurations.
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Add a new debug counter to measure cache hits on the read path
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
This patch introduces pblk, a host-side translation layer for
Open-Channel SSDs to expose them like block devices. The translation
layer allows data placement decisions, and I/O scheduling to be
managed by the host, enabling users to optimize the SSD for their
specific workloads.
An open-channel SSD has a set of LUNs (parallel units) and a
collection of blocks. Each block can be read in any order, but
writes must be sequential. Writes may also fail, and if a block
requires it, must also be reset before new writes can be
applied.
To manage the constraints, pblk maintains a logical to
physical address (L2P) table, write cache, garbage
collection logic, recovery scheme, and logic to rate-limit
user I/Os versus garbage collection I/Os.
The L2P table is fully-associative and manages sectors at a
4KB granularity. Pblk stores the L2P table in two places, in
the out-of-band area of the media and on the last page of a
line. In the cause of a power failure, pblk will perform a
scan to recover the L2P table.
The user data is organized into lines. A line is data
striped across blocks and LUNs. The lines enable the host to
reduce the amount of metadata to maintain besides the user
data and makes it easier to implement RAID or erasure coding
in the future.
pblk implements multi-tenant support and can be instantiated
multiple times on the same drive. Each instance owns a
portion of the SSD - both regarding I/O bandwidth and
capacity - providing I/O isolation for each case.
Finally, pblk also exposes a sysfs interface that allows
user-space to peek into the internals of pblk. The interface
is available at /dev/block/*/pblk/ where * is the block
device name exposed.
This work also contains contributions from:
Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Simon A. F. Lund <slund@cnexlabs.com>
Young Tack Jin <youngtack.jin@gmail.com>
Huaicheng Li <huaicheng@cs.uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Javier González <javier@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Matias Bjørling <matias@cnexlabs.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
