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nfsd uses do_readv_writev() to implement fops->read and fops->write. do_readv_writev() will attempt to read/write using fops->aio_read and fops->aio_write, but it will fallback to fops->read and fops->write when AIO is not available. However, the fallback will perform a call for each individual data page. Since our default recordsize is 128KB, sequential operations on NFS will generate 32 DMU transactions where only 1 transaction was needed. That was unnecessary overhead and we implement fops->aio_read and fops->aio_write to eliminate it. ZFS originated in OpenSolaris, where the AIO API is entirely implemented in userland's libc by intelligently mapping them to VOP_WRITE, VOP_READ and VOP_FSYNC. Linux implements AIO inside the kernel itself. Linux filesystems therefore must implement their own AIO logic and nearly all of them implement fops->aio_write synchronously. Consequently, they do not implement aio_fsync(). However, since the ZPL works by mapping Linux's VFS calls to the functions implementing Illumos' VFS operations, we instead implement AIO in the kernel by mapping the operations to the VOP_READ, VOP_WRITE and VOP_FSYNC equivalents. We therefore implement fops->aio_fsync. One might be inclined to make our fops->aio_write implementation synchronous to make software that expects this behavior safe. However, there are several reasons not to do this: 1. Other platforms do not implement aio_write() synchronously and since the majority of userland software using AIO should be cross platform, expectations of synchronous behavior should not be a problem. 2. We would hurt the performance of programs that use POSIX interfaces properly while simultaneously encouraging the creation of more non-compliant software. 3. The broader community concluded that userland software should be patched to properly use POSIX interfaces instead of implementing hacks in filesystems to cater to broken software. This concept is best described as the O_PONIES debate. 4. Making an asynchronous write synchronous is non sequitur. Any software dependent on synchronous aio_write behavior will suffer data loss on ZFSOnLinux in a kernel panic / system failure of at most zfs_txg_timeout seconds, which by default is 5 seconds. This seems like a reasonable consequence of using non-compliant software. It should be noted that this is also a problem in the kernel itself where nfsd does not pass O_SYNC on files opened with it and instead relies on a open()/write()/close() to enforce synchronous behavior when the flush is only guarenteed on last close. Exporting any filesystem that does not implement AIO via NFS risks data loss in the event of a kernel panic / system failure when something else is also accessing the file. Exporting any file system that implements AIO the way this patch does bears similar risk. However, it seems reasonable to forgo crippling our AIO implementation in favor of developing patches to fix this problem in Linux's nfsd for the reasons stated earlier. In the interim, the risk will remain. Failing to implement AIO will not change the problem that nfsd created, so there is no reason for nfsd's mistake to block our implementation of AIO. It also should be noted that `aio_cancel()` will always return `AIO_NOTCANCELED` under this implementation. It is possible to implement aio_cancel by deferring work to taskqs and use `kiocb_set_cancel_fn()` to set a callback function for cancelling work sent to taskqs, but the simpler approach is allowed by the specification: ``` Which operations are cancelable is implementation-defined. ``` http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/aio_cancel.html The only programs on my system that are capable of using `aio_cancel()` are QEMU, beecrypt and fio use it according to a recursive grep of my system's `/usr/src/debug`. That suggests that `aio_cancel()` users are rare. Implementing aio_cancel() is left to a future date when it is clear that there are consumers that benefit from its implementation to justify the work. Lastly, it is important to known that handling of the iovec updates differs between Illumos and Linux in the implementation of read/write. On Linux, it is the VFS' responsibility whle on Illumos, it is the filesystem's reponsibility. We take the intermediate solution of copying the iovec so that the ZFS code can update it like on Solaris while leaving the originals alone. This imposes some overhead. We could always revisit this should profiling show that the allocations are a problem. Closes: openzfs#223 openzfs#2373 Signed-off-by: Richard Yao <ryao@gentoo.org>
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