mm: provide filemap_range_needs_writeback() helper

Patch series "Improve IOCB_NOWAIT O_DIRECT reads", v3.

An internal workload complained because it was using too much CPU, and
when I took a look, we had a lot of io_uring workers going to town.

For an async buffered read like workload, I am normally expecting _zero_
offloads to a worker thread, but this one had tons of them.  I'd drop
caches and things would look good again, but then a minute later we'd
regress back to using workers.  Turns out that every minute something
was reading parts of the device, which would add page cache for that
inode.  I put patches like these in for our kernel, and the problem was
solved.

Don't -EAGAIN IOCB_NOWAIT dio reads just because we have page cache
entries for the given range.  This causes unnecessary work from the
callers side, when the IO could have been issued totally fine without
blocking on writeback when there is none.

This patch (of 3):

For O_DIRECT reads/writes, we check if we need to issue a call to
filemap_write_and_wait_range() to issue and/or wait for writeback for any
page in the given range.  The existing mechanism just checks for a page in
the range, which is suboptimal for IOCB_NOWAIT as we'll fallback to the
slow path (and needing retry) if there's just a clean page cache page in
the range.

Provide filemap_range_needs_writeback() which tries a little harder to
check if we actually need to issue and/or wait for writeback in the range.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210224164455.1096727-1-axboe@kernel.dk
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210224164455.1096727-2-axboe@kernel.dk
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Reviewed-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index bf4e90d3ab18..12766edee81f 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -2878,6 +2878,8 @@ static inline int filemap_fdatawait(struct address_space *mapping)
 
 extern bool filemap_range_has_page(struct address_space *, loff_t lstart,
 				  loff_t lend);
+extern bool filemap_range_needs_writeback(struct address_space *,
+					  loff_t lstart, loff_t lend);
 extern int filemap_write_and_wait_range(struct address_space *mapping,
 				        loff_t lstart, loff_t lend);
 extern int __filemap_fdatawrite_range(struct address_space *mapping,