Don't ashift-align vdev read requests.

Currently, the size of read and write requests on vdevs is aligned
according to the vdev's ashift, allocating a new ZIO buffer and padding
if need be.

This makes sense for write requests to prevent read/modify/write if the
write happens to be smaller than the device's internal block size.

For reads however, the rationale is less clear. It seems that the
original code aligns reads because, on Solaris, device drivers will
outright refuse unaligned requests.

We don't have that issue on Linux. Indeed, Linux block devices are able
to accept requests of any size, and take care of alignment issues
themselves.

As a result, there's no point in enforcing alignment for read requests
on Linux. This is a nice optimization opportunity for two reasons:
- We remove a memory allocation in a heavily-used code path;
- The request gets aligned in the lowest layer possible, which shrinks
  the path that the additional, useless padding data has to travel.
  For example, when using 4k-sector drives that lie about their sector
  size, using 512b read requests instead of 4k means that there will
  be less data traveling down the ATA/SCSI interface, even though the
  drive actually reads 4k from the platter.

The only exception is raidz, because raidz needs to read the whole
allocated block for parity.

This patch removes alignment enforcement for read requests, except on
raidz. Note that we also remove an assertion that checks that we're
aligning a top-level vdev I/O, because that's not the case anymore for
repair writes that results from failed reads.

Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <[email protected]>
Closes #1022

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/module/zfs/zio.c b/module/zfs/zio.c
index 6333c787d..ace72a087 100644
--- a/module/zfs/zio.c
+++ b/module/zfs/zio.c
@@ -2432,19 +2432,25 @@ zio_vdev_io_start(zio_t *zio)
 
 	align = 1ULL << vd->vdev_top->vdev_ashift;
 
-	if (P2PHASE(zio->io_size, align) != 0) {
+	/*
+	 * On Linux, we don't care about read alignment. The backing block
+	 * device driver will take care of that for us.
+	 * The only exception is raidz, which needs a full block for parity.
+	 */
+	if (P2PHASE(zio->io_size, align) != 0 &&
+	    (zio->io_type != ZIO_TYPE_READ ||
+	     vd->vdev_ops == &vdev_raidz_ops)) {
 		uint64_t asize = P2ROUNDUP(zio->io_size, align);
 		char *abuf = zio_buf_alloc(asize);
-		ASSERT(vd == vd->vdev_top);
 		if (zio->io_type == ZIO_TYPE_WRITE) {
 			bcopy(zio->io_data, abuf, zio->io_size);
 			bzero(abuf + zio->io_size, asize - zio->io_size);
 		}
 		zio_push_transform(zio, abuf, asize, asize, zio_subblock);
+		ASSERT(P2PHASE(zio->io_size, align) == 0);
 	}
 
 	ASSERT(P2PHASE(zio->io_offset, align) == 0);
-	ASSERT(P2PHASE(zio->io_size, align) == 0);
 	VERIFY(zio->io_type != ZIO_TYPE_WRITE || spa_writeable(spa));
 
 	/*