[PATCH] erofs: add direct I/O support for compressed data
Gao Xiang
hsiangkao at linux.alibaba.com
Tue Sep 23 00:43:29 AEST 2025
Hi Chunhai,
On 2025/9/22 20:43, Chunhai Guo wrote:
> Direct I/O is particularly useful in memory-sensitive scenarios, as it
> provides more predictable performance by avoiding unnecessary page cache
> overheads. For example, when accessing large files such as AI model files
> that are typically read only once, buffered I/O introduces redundant page
> cache usage and extra page copies, leading to unstable performance and
> increased CPU load due to memory reclaim. While Direct I/O can avoid these.
>
> The table below shows that the performance of direct I/O is up to 54.6%
> higher than buffered I/O in the low-memory scenario. The results were
> obtained using the fio benchmark with 8 threads, each thread read a 2.5GB
> file, on ARM64 Android devices running the 6.6 kernel with an 8-core CPU
> and 12GB of memory.
>
> +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
> | fio benchmark | buffered I/O (MiB/s) | direct I/O (MiB/s) | diff |
> |---------------------+----------------------+--------------------+--------|
> | normal scenario | 2629.8 | 3648.7 | +38.7% |
> |---------------------+----------------------+--------------------+--------|
> | low memory scenario | 2350.0 | 3633.9 | +54.6% |
> +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Thanks for your patch!
Yes, avoid page cache by using direct I/O for read-once data (e.g.
distributing huge LLM model) actually makes sense on my side and your test
result is impressive.
I will look into your implementation later, since it's too late for v6.18.
Let's address this feature for the v6.19 cycle.
Thanks,
Gao Xiang
>
> This patch does not support the following two cases. They will fall back to
> buffered I/O:
> (1) large folios, which will be supported in a follow-up patch.
> (2) folios with private data attached, as the private data is required by
> this direct I/O implementation.
>
> Signed-off-by: Chunhai Guo <guochunhai at vivo.com>
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