dm crypt: add flags to optionally bypass kcryptd workqueues

This is a follow up to [1] that detailed latency problems associated
with dm-crypt's use of workqueues when processing IO.

Current dm-crypt implementation creates a significant IO performance
overhead (at least on small IO block sizes) for both latency and
throughput. We suspect offloading IO request processing into
workqueues and async threads is more harmful these days with the
modern fast storage. I also did some digging into the dm-crypt git
history and much of this async processing is not needed anymore,
because the reasons it was added are mostly gone from the kernel. More
details can be found in [2] (see "Git archeology" section).

This change adds DM_CRYPT_NO_READ_WORKQUEUE and
DM_CRYPT_NO_WRITE_WORKQUEUE flags for read and write BIOs, which
direct dm-crypt to not offload crypto operations into kcryptd
workqueues.  In addition, writes are not buffered to be sorted in the
dm-crypt red-black tree, but dispatched immediately. For cases, where
crypto operations cannot happen (hard interrupt context, for example
the read path of some NVME drivers), we offload the work to a tasklet
rather than a workqueue.

These flags only ensure no async BIO processing in the dm-crypt
module. It is worth noting that some Crypto API implementations may
offload encryption into their own workqueues, which are independent of
the dm-crypt and its configuration. However upon enabling these new
flags dm-crypt will instruct Crypto API not to backlog crypto
requests.

To give an idea of the performance gains for certain workloads,
consider the script, and results when tested against various
devices, detailed here:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/2020-July/msg00138.html

[1]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/dm-crypt/msg07516.html
[2]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-linux-disk-encryption/

Signed-off-by: Ignat Korchagin <ignat@cloudflare.com>
Reviewed-by: Damien Le Moal <damien.lemoal@wdc.com>
Reviewed-by: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions