I added blk_run_backing_dev on page_cache_async_readahead so readahead I/O

is unpluged to improve throughput on especially RAID environment.

The normal case is, if page N become uptodate at time T(N), then T(N) <=
T(N+1) holds.  With RAID (and NFS to some degree), there is no strict
ordering, the data arrival time depends on runtime status of individual
disks, which breaks that formula.  So in do_generic_file_read(), just
after submitting the async readahead IO request, the current page may well
be uptodate, so the page won't be locked, and the block device won't be
implicitly unplugged:

               if (PageReadahead(page))
                        page_cache_async_readahead()
                if (!PageUptodate(page))
                                goto page_not_up_to_date;
                //...
page_not_up_to_date:
                lock_page_killable(page);

Therefore explicit unplugging can help.

Following is the test result with dd.

#dd if=testdir/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16384

-2.6.30-rc6
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 224.182 seconds, 76.6 MB/s

-2.6.30-rc6-patched
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
17179869184 bytes (17 GB) copied, 206.465 seconds, 83.2 MB/s

(7Disks RAID-0 Array)

-2.6.30-rc6
1054976+0 records in
1054976+0 records out
17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 212.233 seconds, 81.4 MB/s

-2.6.30-rc6-patched
1054976+0 records out
17284726784 bytes (17 GB) copied, 198.878 seconds, 86.9 MB/s

(7Disks RAID-5 Array)

The patch was found to improve performance with the SCST scsi target
driver.  See
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=a0272b440906030714g67eabc5k8f847fb1e538cc62%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=scst-devel

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: unbust comment layout]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: "fix" CONFIG_BLOCK=n]
Signed-off-by: Hisashi Hifumi <hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp>
Acked-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Tested-by: Ronald <intercommit@gmail.com>
Cc: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@gmail.com>
Cc: Vladislav Bolkhovitin <vst@vlnb.net>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

mm/readahead.c

@@ -547,5 +547,17 @@ page_cache_async_readahead(struct address_space *mapping,
 
 	/* do read-ahead */
 	ondemand_readahead(mapping, ra, filp, true, offset, req_size);
+
+#ifdef CONFIG_BLOCK
+	/*
+	 * Normally the current page is !uptodate and lock_page() will be
+	 * immediately called to implicitly unplug the device. However this
+	 * is not always true for RAID conifgurations, where data arrives
+	 * not strictly in their submission order. In this case we need to
+	 * explicitly kick off the IO.
+	 */
+	if (PageUptodate(page))
+		blk_run_backing_dev(mapping->backing_dev_info, NULL);
+#endif
 }
 EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(page_cache_async_readahead);