In order to have the option to use O_DIRECT/FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING in a
later commit, we need the addresses of user space buffers to be well
aligned. The exact requirements vary by OS and file system (typically
sectors and/or memory pages). The address alignment size is set to
4096, which is enough for currently known systems: it matches modern
sectors and common memory page size. There is no standard governing
O_DIRECT's requirements so we might eventually have to reconsider this
with more information from the field or future systems.
Aligning I/O buffers on memory pages is also known to improve regular
buffered I/O performance.
Three classes of I/O buffers for regular data pages are adjusted:
(1) Heap buffers are now allocated with the new palloc_aligned() or
MemoryContextAllocAligned() functions introduced by commit 439f6175.
(2) Stack buffers now use a new struct PGIOAlignedBlock to respect
PG_IO_ALIGN_SIZE, if possible with this compiler. (3) The buffer
pool is also aligned in shared memory.
WAL buffers were already aligned on XLOG_BLCKSZ. It's possible for
XLOG_BLCKSZ to be configured smaller than PG_IO_ALIGNED_SIZE and thus
for O_DIRECT WAL writes to fail to be well aligned, but that's a
pre-existing condition and will be addressed by a later commit.
BufFiles are not yet addressed (there's no current plan to use O_DIRECT
for those, but they could potentially get some incidental speedup even
in plain buffered I/O operations through better alignment).
If we can't align stack objects suitably using the compiler extensions
we know about, we disable the use of O_DIRECT by setting PG_O_DIRECT to
0. This avoids the need to consider systems that have O_DIRECT but
can't align stack objects the way we want; such systems could in theory
be supported with more work but we don't currently know of any such
machines, so it's easier to pretend there is no O_DIRECT support
instead. That's an existing and tested class of system.
Add assertions that all buffers passed into smgrread(), smgrwrite() and
smgrextend() are correctly aligned, unless PG_O_DIRECT is 0 (= stack
alignment tricks may be unavailable) or the block size has been set too
small to allow arrays of buffers to be all aligned.
Author: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+hUKGK1X532hYqJ_MzFWt0n1zt8trz980D79WbjwnT-yYLZpg@mail.gmail.com
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