After a couple of weeks of painstakingly slow progress, Tux3 now is
close enough to having extents that I feel it is time to sit back,
limber up the proverbial knuckle joints for some heavy typing, and
launch yet another Tux3 design missive into the wild blue yonder.

What is all this noise about extents and why is everybody doing it? And
what is an extent anyway?

Traditional filesystems record a pointer to each individual disk block,
whereas modern extent-based filesystems record pointers to runs of disk
blocks, each such extent having a starting address and a count of data
blocks that store all or part of some file. A file may consist of many
extents, and may be sparse, which requires that logical addresses also
be stored, in order to know the position of each extent within a file.
An extent can therefore be thought of as a triple {logical address,
physical address, block count} or alternatively, as a pair {physical
address, block count} indexed by a logical address. Tux3 uses the
latter approach while Ext4 uses the former.

Extents themselves are simple things: just add a count to a block
pointer and you have an extent, which is just what we did in Tux3. The
extent count is packed into 6 unused bits of a 64 bit physical block
pointer. "For free" you could say.

On the other hand, algorithms to handle extents are far from simple. It
is amazing how much complexity jumped out of the woodwork when that
innocent little count field appeared. For one thing, extents
constitute variable sized logical objects so you can't store them in a
radix tree as with the classic direct/indirect/double/triple scheme
inherited by Ext2 from UFS. A considerably more complex b-tree scheme
is required. Well, we had the b-trees anyway for other reasons
(variable sized inodes, multiple block pointers per logical address)
but that is just one of the issues.

Extents introduce a large number of new boundary conditions into file
allocation and access code. To illustrate, consider the complexity of
rewriting a region of a file on top of some number of pre-existing
extents, which can have gaps between them. We want to overwrite some
extents and allocate new extents to fill in the gaps. Maybe we want to
enlarge some existing extents where possible, or delete some of the
pre-existing extents in favor of a larger, newly allocated contiguous
region. Maybe beginning or end of the region we are writing lands in
the middle of a pre-existing extent, and we have to handle that. This
is a whole lot more detail to worry about than just writing a block at
a time, no? Indeed it is. So why would we want to put ourselves
through such pain anyway?

The answer is: extents yield huge performance benefits. Recently,
somebody said that extents are just a performance hack, and that is
true, but then cache is just a performance hack too. Extents are
simply the biggest performance optimization to come along for
filesystems since... buffer cache.

We get all of these benefits from extents:

* Allocate an entire range of blocks at once - fewer trips into
the allocator.

* Each extent is allocated contiguously - fragmentation reduction
without guesswork.

* Assign disk addresses to entire ranges of a file write at once -
fewer walks through the file index blocks.

* At sync time, form larger and fewer bio transactions that can be
merged more efficiently by the disk elevator and require less
handling in the block IO path than individual blocks.

* Fewer edits of file metadata - don't trash the cache.

* More compact representation on disk - less metadata to load into
memory and write back out to disk.

* Lower ratio of metadata blocks to data blocks - less seeking on

* More compact representation in memory - less cache pressure.

* Extent data is handled in batches at each step: allocation,
index editing, io submission, freeing, so code execution is well
localized - better use of processor execution cache.

To quantify some of these benefits, consider that a block-oriented
filesystem like Ext3 must read one index block for each thousand data
blocks, 4 MB of data, which takes about 16 milliseconds to read. If an
extra seek is required to pick up the next index block, and then back
to where the next data will be read, that is maybe 12 ms on top of the
16 ms linear transfer time, a 75% performance penalty. Tux3 indexes
about 85 MB of data per index block, which translates into about 3%
seek overhead for a large linear read.

An even more dramatic improvement can be expected with file deletion.
Ext3 has to read one metadata block per 4 MB of deleted data in order
to find the blocks that should be freed. This overhead is about 1.5
seconds per Gigabyte, or 25 minutes per terabyte. Tux3 will reduce
that to about .07 seconds per gigabyte or about 1.2 minutes per
terabyte, using extents.

In both cases, further savings can be had using larger extents, but
Tux3's modest 64 block extent limit already promises upwards of 95% of
the benefit that is to be had. That said, Tux3 may well add an
optimization to support larger extents later. This is not very hard,
it is just more code, but for the time being we have a better use in
mind for those bits we saved (versioning).

As mentioned above, the one big drawback of extents is that they are
hard to code and get right. That is why they have only slowly appeared
in our grassroots open source filesystems on Linux. Big iron Unix
vendors have known about the benefits of extents for decades, and have
had the workloads to showcase them. Well now we have those loads on
Linux too. Time to get our collective act together.

I did not get into the details of Tux3's extent design because this post
is already long enough. But they are interesting, at least I think so,
and do deserve a post of their own. Please stay tuned. And please
keep in mind: Halloween is fast approaching, and therefore so is the
Tux3 Halloween Cabal party.


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