I want to know whether the buffer cache in Linux kernel is present for file systems like UDF for DVD and FUSE?
I tried to search for this but unfortunately found little information.
Thanks.
The buffer cache will be used for any access to a filehandle opened against a block device, unless the file handle is opened with O_DIRECT. This includes accesses on behalf of FUSE filesystems. Note that if FUSE does caching as well (I don't know offhand), this may result in double-caching of data; unlike normal in-kernel filesystems, with FUSE the kernel can't safely overlap the page and buffer caches. In this case it may be worthwhile to consider using O_DIRECT in the FUSE filesystem daemon to reduce cache pressure (but be sure to profile first!).
For in-kernel filesystems such as UDF, the buffer cache will be used for all IO. For blocks containing file data, the block will simultaneously be in both the buffer and page caches (using the same underlying memory). This will be accounted as page cache, not buffer cache, in memory usage statistics.
Related
If I open a file with O_DIRECT flag, does it mean that whenever a write(blocking mode) to that file returns, the data is on disk?
(This answer pertains to Linux - other OSes may have different caveats/semantics)
Let's start with the sub-question:
If I open a file with O_DIRECT flag, does it mean that whenever a write(blocking mode) to that file returns, the data is on disk?
No (as #michael-foukarakis commented) - if you need a guarantee your data made it to non-volatile storage you must use/add something else.
What does O_DIRECT really mean?
It's a hint that you want your I/O to bypass the Linux kernel's caches. What will actually happen depends on things like:
Disk configuration
Whether you are opening a block device or a file in a filesystem
If using a file within a filesystem
The exact filesystem used and the options in use on the filesystem and the file
Whether you've correctly aligned your I/O
Whether a filesystem has to do a new block allocation to satisfy your I/O
If the underlying disk is local, what layers you have in your kernel storage stack before you reach the disk block device
Linux kernel version
...
The list above is not exhaustive.
In the "best" case, setting O_DIRECT will avoid making extra copies of data while transferring it and the call will return after transfer is complete. You are more likely to be in this case when directly opening block devices of "real" local disks. As previously stated, even this property doesn't guarantee that data of a successful write() call will survive sudden power loss. IF the data is DMA'd out of RAM to non-volatile storage (e.g. battery backed RAID controller) or the RAM itself is persistent storage THEN you may have a guarantee that the data reached stable storage that can survive power loss. To know if this is the case you have to qualify your hardware stack so you can't assume this in general.
In the "worst" case, O_DIRECT can mean nothing at all even though setting it wasn't rejected and subsequent calls "succeed". Sometimes things in the Linux storage stack (like certain filesystem setups) can choose to ignore it because of what they have to do or because you didn't satisfy the requirements (which is legal) and just silently do buffered I/O instead (i.e. write to a buffer/satisfy read from already buffered data). It is unclear whether extra effort will be made to ensure that the data of an acknowledged write was at least "with the device" (but in the O_DIRECT and barriers thread Christoph Hellwig posts that the O_DIRECT fallback will ensure data has at least been sent to the device). A further complication is that using O_DIRECT implies nothing about file metadata so even if write data is "with the device" by call completion, key file metadata (like the size of the file because you were doing an append) may not be. Thus you may not actually be able to get at the data you thought had been transferred after a crash (it may appear truncated, or all zeros etc).
While brief testing can make it look like data using O_DIRECT alone always implies data will be on disk after a write returns, changing things (e.g. using an Ext4 filesystem instead of XFS) can weaken what is actually achieved in very drastic ways.
As you mention "guarantee that the data" (rather than metadata) perhaps you're looking for O_DSYNC/fdatasync()? If you want to guarantee metadata was written too, you will have to look at O_SYNC/fsync().
References
Ext4 Wiki: Clarifying Direct IO's Semantics. Also contains notes about what O_DIRECT does on a few non-Linux OSes.
The "[PATCH 1/1 linux-next] ext4: add compatibility flag check to the patch" LKML thread has a reply from Ext4 lead dev Ted Ts'o talking about how filesystems can fallback to buffered I/O for O_DIRECT rather than failing the open() call.
In the "ubifs: Allow O_DIRECT" LKML thread Btrfs lead developer Chris Mason states Btrfs resorts to buffered I/O when O_DIRECT is requested on compressed files.
ZFS on Linux commit message discussing the semantics of O_DIRECT in different scenarios. Also see the (at the time of writing mid-2020) proposed new O_DIRECT semantics for ZFS on Linux (the interactions are complex and defy a brief explanation).
Linux open(2) man page (search for O_DIRECT in the Description section and the Notes section)
Ensuring data reaches disk LWN article
Infamous Linus Torvalds O_DIRECT LKML thread summary (for even more context you can see the full LKML thread)
I have a C program that runs only weekly, and reads a large amount of files only once. Since Linux also caches everything that's read, they fill up the cache needlessly and this slows down the system a lot unless it has an SSD drive.
So how do I open and read from a file without filling up the disk cache?
Note:
By disk caching I mean that when you read a file twice, the second time it's read from RAM, not from disk. I.e. data once read from the disk is left in RAM, so subsequent reads of the same file will not need to reread the data from disk.
I believe passing O_DIRECT to open() should help:
O_DIRECT (Since Linux 2.4.10)
Try to minimize cache effects of the I/O to and from this file. In general this will degrade performance, but it is useful in special situations, such as when applications do their own caching. File I/O is done directly to/from user space buffers. The O_DIRECT flag on its own makes at an effort to transfer data synchronously, but does not give the guarantees of the O_SYNC that data and necessary metadata are transferred. To guarantee synchronous I/O the O_SYNC must be used in addition to O_DIRECT.
There are further detailed notes on O_DIRECT towards the bottom of the man page, including a fun quote from Linus.
You can use posix_fadvise() with the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED advice to request that the system free the pages you've already read.
I am using ext4 on linux 2.6 kernel. I have records in byte arrays, which can range from few hundred to 16MB. Is there any benefit in an application using write() for every record as opposed to saying buffering X MB and then using write() on X MB?
If there is a benefit in buffering, what would be a good value for ext4. This question is for someone who has profiled the behavior of the multiblock allocator in ext4.
My understanding is that filesystem will buffer in multiples of pagesize and attempt to flush them on disk. What happens if the buffer provided to write() is bigger than filesystem buffer? Is this a crude way to force filesystem to flush to disk()
The "correct" answer depends on what you really want to do with the data.
write(2) is designed as single trip into kernel space, and provides good control over I/O. However, unless the file is opened with O_SYNC, the data goes into kernel's cache only, not on disk. O_SYNC changes that to ensure file is synchroinized to disk. The actual writing to disk is issued by kernel cache, and ext4 will try to allocate as big buffer to write to minimize fragmentation, iirc. In general, write(2) with either buffered or O_SYNC file is a good way to control whether the data goes to kernel or whether it's still in your application's cache.
However, for writing lots of records, you might be interested in writev(2), which writes data from a list of buffers. Similarly to write(2), it's an atomic call (though of course that's only in OS semantics, not actually on disk, unless, again, Direct I/O is used).
We want to try our bests to avoid data loss during power failure. So I decide to use O_DIRECT flag to open a file to write data in disk. Does O_DIRECT mean that the data bypass OS cache completely? If the request returns successful to the application, does it mean that the data must have been flushed to the disk? If I open a regular file in one file system, how about the FS metadata? Is it also be flushed immediately, or is it cached?
By the way, O_DIRECT can be used in Windows? Or are there any corresponding method in Windows?
O_DIRECT will probably do what you want, but it will greatly slow down your I/O.
I think just calling fsync() or fflush() depending on whether you use direct file descriptor operations or FILE * should be enough.
As for the metadata question, it depends on the underlying file system and even on the hardware if you want to be extra paranoid. A hard drive (and especially a SSD) may report the operation finished but could take a while to actually write the data.
You can use O_DIRECT but for many applications, calling fdatasync() is more convenient. O_DIRECT imposes a lot of restrictions because the IOs completely bypass the OS cache. It bypasses read cache as well as write cache.
For filesystem metadata, all you can do is fsync() your file after writing it. fsync flushes the file metadata, so you can be sure that the file won't disappear (or change its attributes etc) if the power is lost immediately afterwards.
Any of these mechanisms depend on your IO subsystem not lying to the OS about having persisted data to storage, and in many cases, other hardware-dependent things (such as the RAID controller battery not running out before the power returns)
CreateFile can do this.
HANDLE WINAPI CreateFile(
__in LPCTSTR lpFileName,
__in DWORD dwDesiredAccess,
__in DWORD dwShareMode,
__in_opt LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpSecurityAttributes,
__in DWORD dwCreationDisposition,
__in DWORD dwFlagsAndAttributes,
__in_opt HANDLE hTemplateFile
);
For dwFlagsAndAttributes you can specify FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH and FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING.
If FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH and
FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING are both
specified, so that system caching is
not in effect, then the data is
immediately flushed to disk without
going through the Windows system
cache. The operating system also
requests a write-through of the hard
disk's local hardware cache to
persistent media.
Can I use O_DIRECT for write requests to avoid data loss during power failure?
No!
On Linux while O_DIRECT tries to bypass your OS's cache it never bypasses your disk's cache. If your disk has a volatile write cache you can still lose data that was only in the disk cache during an abrupt power off!
Does O_DIRECT mean that the data bypass OS cache completely?
Usually, but some Linux filesystems may fall back to buffered I/O with O_DIRECT (the Ext4 Wiki Clarifying Direct IO's Semantics
page warns this can happen with allocating writes).
If the request returns successful to the application, does it mean that the data must have been flushed to the disk?
It usually means the disk has "seen" it but see the above caveats (e.g. data might have gone to buffer cache / data might only be in disk's volatile cache).
If I open a regular file in one file system, how about the FS metadata? Is it also be flushed immediately, or is it cached?
Excellent question! Metadata may still be rolling around in cache and not yet synced to disk even though the request finished successfully.
All of the above mean you HAVE to do the appropriate fsync() command in the correct places (and check their results!) if you want to be sure whether an operation has reached non-volatile storage. See https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/ and the LWN article "Ensuring data reaches disk" for details.
The use and effects of the O_SYNC and O_DIRECT flags is very confusing and appears to vary somewhat among platforms. From the Linux man page (see an example here), O_DIRECT provides synchronous I/O, minimizes cache effects and requires you to handle block size alignment yourself. O_SYNC just guarantees synchronous I/O. Although both guarantee that data is written into the hard disk's cache, I believe that direct I/O operations are supposed to be faster than plain synchronous I/O since they bypass the page cache (Though FreeBSD's man page for open(2) states that the cache is bypassed when O_SYNC is used. See here).
What exactly are the differences between the O_DIRECT and O_SYNC flags? Some implementations suggest using O_SYNC | O_DIRECT. Why?
O_DIRECT alone only promises that the kernel will avoid copying data from user space to kernel space, and will instead write it directly via DMA (Direct memory access; if possible). Data does not go into caches. There is no strict guarantee that the function will return only after all data has been transferred.
O_SYNC guarantees that the call will not return before all data has been transferred to the disk (as far as the OS can tell). This still does not guarantee that the data isn't somewhere in the harddisk write cache, but it is as much as the OS can guarantee.
O_DIRECT|O_SYNC is the combination of these, i.e. "DMA + guarantee".
Actuall under linux 2.6, o_direct is syncronous, see the man page:
manpage of open, there is 2 section about it..
Under 2.4 it is not guaranteed
O_DIRECT (Since Linux 2.4.10)
Try to minimize cache effects of the I/O to and from this file. Ingeneral this will degrade performance, but it is useful in special situations, such as when applications do their own caching. File
I/O is done directly to/from user-space buffers. The O_DIRECT flag on its own makes an effort to transfer data synchronously, but does not give the guarantees of the O_SYNC flag that data and necessary metadata are transferred. To guarantee synchronous I/O, O_SYNC must be used in addition to O_DIRECT. See NOTES below for further discussion.
A semantically similar (but deprecated) interface for block devices is described in raw(8).
but under 2.6 it is guaranteed, see
O_DIRECT
The O_DIRECT flag may impose alignment restrictions on the length and address of userspace buffers and the file offset of I/Os. In Linux alignment restrictions vary by file system and kernel version and might be absent entirely. However there is currently no file system-independent interface for an application to discover these restrictions for a given file or file system. Some file systems provide their own interfaces for doing so, for example the XFS_IOC_DIOINFO operation in xfsctl(3).
Under Linux 2.4, transfer sizes, and the alignment of the user buffer and the file offset must all be multiples of the logical block size of the file system. Under Linux 2.6, alignment to 512-byte boundaries suffices.
O_DIRECT I/Os should never be run concurrently with the fork(2) system call, if the memory buffer is a private mapping (i.e., any mapping created with the mmap(2) MAP_PRIVATE flag; this includes memory allocated on the heap and statically allocated buffers). Any such I/Os, whether submitted via an asynchronous I/O interface or from another thread in the process, should be completed before fork(2) is called. Failure to do so can result in data corruption and undefined behavior in parent and child processes. This restriction does not apply when the memory buffer for the O_DIRECT I/Os was created using shmat(2) or mmap(2) with the MAP_SHARED flag. Nor does this restriction apply when the memory buffer has been advised as MADV_DONTFORK with madvise(2), ensuring that it will not be available to the child after fork(2).
The O_DIRECT flag was introduced in SGI IRIX, where it has alignment restrictions similar to those of Linux 2.4. IRIX has also a fcntl(2) call to query appropriate alignments, and sizes. FreeBSD 4.x introduced a flag of the same name, but without alignment restrictions.
O_DIRECT support was added under Linux in kernel version 2.4.10. Older Linux kernels simply ignore this flag. Some file systems may not implement the flag and open() will fail with EINVAL if it is used.
Applications should avoid mixing O_DIRECT and normal I/O to the same file, and especially to overlapping byte regions in the same file. Even when the file system correctly handles the coherency issues in this situation, overall I/O throughput is likely to be slower than using either mode alone. Likewise, applications should avoid mixing mmap(2) of files with direct I/O to the same files.
The behaviour of O_DIRECT with NFS will differ from local file systems. Older kernels, or kernels configured in certain ways, may not support this combination. The NFS protocol does not support passing the flag to the server, so O_DIRECT I/O will only bypass the page cache on the client; the server may still cache the I/O. The client asks the server to make the I/O synchronous to preserve the synchronous semantics of O_DIRECT. Some servers will perform poorly under these circumstances, especially if the I/O size is small. Some servers may also be configured to lie to clients about the I/O having reached stable storage; this will avoid the performance penalty at some risk to data integrity in the event of server power failure. The Linux NFS client places no alignment restrictions on O_DIRECT I/O.
In summary, O_DIRECT is a potentially powerful tool that should be used with caution. It is recommended that applications treat use of O_DIRECT as a performance option which is disabled by default.
"The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey on some serious mind-controlling substances."---Linus
AFAIK, O_DIRECT bypasses the page cache. O_SYNC uses page cache but syncs it immediately. Page cache is shared between processes so if there is another process that is working on the same file without O_DIRECT flag can read the correct data.
This IBM doc explains the difference rather clearly, I think.
A file opened in the O_DIRECT mode ("direct I/O"), GPFS™ transfers data directly between the user buffer and the file on the disk.Using direct I/O may provide some performance benefits in the
following cases:
The file is accessed at random locations.
There is no access locality.
Direct transfer between the user buffer and the disk can only happen
if all of the following conditions are true: The number of bytes
transferred is a multiple of 512 bytes. The file offset is a multiple
of 512 bytes. The user memory buffer address is aligned on a 512-byte
boundary. When these conditions are not all true, the operation will
still proceed but will be treated more like other normal file I/O,
with the O_SYNC flag that flushes the dirty buffer to disk.