Dropped lazy grafting, but kept lazy crystallization

This merges LFS3_o_GRAFT into LFS3_o_UNCRYST, simplifying the file write
path and avoiding the mess that is ungrafted leaves.

---

This goes for a different lazy crystallization/grafting strategy that
was overlooked before. Instead of requiring all leaves to be both
crystallized and grafted, we allow leaves to be uncrystallied, but they
_must_ be grafted (in-tree) at all times.

This gets us most of the rewrite preformance of lazy-crystallization,
without needing to worry about out-of-date file leaves.

Out-of-date file leaves were a headache for both code cost and concerns
around confusing filesystem states and related bugs.

Note LFS3_o_UNCRYST gets some extra behavior here:

- LFS3_o_UNCRYST indicates when crystallization is _necessary_, and no
  longer when crystallization is _possible_.

  We already keep track of when crystallization is _possible_ via bptr's
  erased-state, and this lets us control recrystallization in
  lfs3_file_flush_ without erased-state-clearing hacks (which probably
  wouldn't work with the future ddtree).

- We opportunistically clear the UNCRYST flag if it's not possible for
  future lfs3_file_crystallize_ calls to make progress:
  - When we crystallize a full block
  - When we hit the end of the file
  - When we hit a hole
  - When we hit an unaligned block

---

Note this does impact performance!

Unlike true lazy grafting, eagerly grafting means we're always
committing to the bshrub/btree more than is strictly necessary, and this
translates to more frequent btree node erases/compactions.

Current simulated benchmarks show a ~3x increase (~20us -> ~60us) in
write times for linear file writes on NOR flash.

However:

- The moment you need unaligned progs, this performance optimization
  goes out the window, as we need to graft bptrs before any padding
  fragments.

- This only kicks in once we start crystallizing. So any writes <
  crystal_thresh (both in new files and in between blocks) are forced
  to commit to the bshrub/btree every flush.

  This risks a difficult to predict performance characteristic.

- If you sync frequently (logging), we're forced to crystallize/graft
  anyways.

- The performance hit can be alleviated with either larger writes or
  larger caches, though I realize this goes against littlefs's
  "RAM-not-required" mantra.

Worst case, we can always bring back "lazy grafting" as a
high-performance option in the future.

Though note the above concerns around in-between/pre crystallization
performance. This may only make sense when cache_size >= both prog_size
and crystal_thresh.

And of course, there's a significant code tradeoff!

           code          stack          ctx
  before: 38020           2456          656
  after:  37588 (-1.1%)   2472 (+0.7%)  656 (+0.0%)

Uh, ignore that stack cost. The simplified logic leads to more functions
being inlined, which makes a mess of our stack measurements because we
don't take shrinkwrapping into account.
This commit is contained in:
Christopher Haster
2025-07-03 13:42:54 -05:00
parent eb884011ec
commit a85f08cfe3
3 changed files with 121 additions and 223 deletions
+1 -2
View File
@@ -49,8 +49,7 @@ FLAGS = [
('o', 'UNCREAT', 0x02000000, "File does not exist yet" ),
('o', 'UNSYNC', 0x01000000, "File's metadata does not match disk" ),
('o', 'UNCRYST', 0x00800000, "File's leaf not fully crystallized" ),
('o', 'UNGRAFT', 0x00400000, "File's leaf does not match bshrub/btree" ),
('o', 'UNFLUSH', 0x00200000, "File's data does not match disk" ),
('o', 'UNFLUSH', 0x00400000, "File's cache does not match disk" ),
# Custom attribute flags
('A', 'MODE', 3, "The attr's access mode" ),