This was already made unconditional upstream as a part of LFS_DEFINES
support.
We should try to avoid conditional definitions that depend on
unintuitive conditions (LFS3_CFG in this case). It just makes the whole
codebase more fragile.
This gets gc tests working with both LFS3_GC=1 and LFS3_PREERASE=1, and
adds a few more tests that should round out the necessary preerase test
coverage:
- test_gc_preerase_progress - A simple test that checks if
LFS3_GC_PREERASE clears the LFS3_I_PREERASE flag, as well as some
checks against emubd's erase counters to see if it actually did
anything (erased >= cycles - preerased, erased < 1.25*cycles -
preerased).
- test_gc_preerase_relaxed - A test with a couple different
GC_PREERASE_COUNTs, and checks against emubd's erase counters to make
sure they demonstrate different levels of pre-erasing (erased >=
cycles - preerased, erased < 1.25*cycles - preerased).
- test_gc_preerase_decreasing - A test with increasing
GC_PREERASE_COUNTs, measuring min/max/avg emubd's erase counters, and
asserting if the avg delta is worst than ~0.75x.
This is probably the most valuable one, if only for the extra analysis
available when debugging.
And, just so we know these tests are working, they found a few more bugs:
- We were calling the implicitly ckpointing variant of lfs3_mdir_commit
in lfs3_allocclaim, when the block we just allocated is still very
much in-flight!
An easy one-character fix (lfs3_mdir_commit -> lfs3_mdir_commit_, the
non-ckpointing variant), but was a pain to track down. I guess the
good news is test_gc_nospc has proven to be a very valuable test.
Added a comment to hopefully discourage a regression.
- Found a wacky catch-22 where the block we just preerased can be
allocated during the gbmap commit that tries to save the preerased
ecksum.
This is somewhat expected during normal operation, the gbmap may need
a few allocations before the preeraser can get ahead, but we need to
make sure not to increment the preeraser's known window if the
preerased block is no longer in the gbmap's known window.
Fortunately(?), our preeraser state is pretty robust to bugs like this
due to being reset (forcing ecksum refetches) during gbmap rebuilds.
However, preeraser state falling out-of-sync risks unnecessary
erases/surprising latency during block allocation.
- Found a typo where we used lfs3->cfg->block_count instead of
lfs3->block_count again... Hopefully this becomes impossible after the
planned config rework...
---
A few other test tweaks:
- Added LFS3_F/M_REVPERTURB flags where necessary to support PREERASE.
Previously the tests only worked with LFS3_YES_REVPERTURB=1.
- Adopt lfs3_handle_isopen over lfs3.handles == lfs3.gc.t.h. With the
logic change to use the traversal handle to track its position in the
open file handles, these simplified isopen checks no longer work.
- Prefer toml lists for multiple ifdefs (hey, these were at least useful
for testing test.py's ifdef exprs).
Code changes:
code stack ctx
before: 35260 2136 660
after: 35260 (+0.0%) 2136 (+0.0%) 660 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
gbmap before: 38616 2144 776
gbmap after: 38616 (+0.0%) 2144 (+0.0%) 776 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
preerase before: 39232 2168 796
preerase after: 39280 (+0.1%) 2168 (+0.0%) 796 (+0.0%)
Previously these only implied M/F flags, which risks quite a bit of
confusion. It's entirely reasonable to expect these to affect lfs3_fs_gc
(arguably the more correct behavior?) but they did not.
Maybe these should imply the GC behavior, or maybe we should rename them
to LFS3_YES_GC_*/LFS3_YES_M_*/etc, but at the very least the current
behavior of implying M/F is probably not a good idea.
So, removing for now. This is the safest option, and better thought-out
behavior can be added in the future.
The original motivation for making LFS3_PREERASE opt-out, is that it
makes sense for LFS3_GBMAP to bring in all gbmap-related features
(PREERASE, BADBLOCKS (future)). However, after a bit of use, I think
this just complicates our ifdef logic too much.
So instead, LFS3_PREERASE is now opt-in, with the intention of making
all ifdefs relative only to the default build. I think this will make it
easier to reason about ifdefs, at least internally.
Eventually, I want to look into alternative default builds (LFS3_BIGGER,
LFS3_BIGGERR, ..., LFS3_BIGGEST), which would provide an alternative way
to enable all gbmap-related features. Though these builds have a
high-risk of bikeshedding (LFS3_GC?), so we'll see.
---
That being said, the main ergonomic improvement was probably adding
a #error, so we don't have to check ifdef GBMAP everywhere.
Maybe this should be extended to LFS3_RDONLY? Or maybe not, LFS3_RDONLY
is a bit of a special case.
No code changes:
code stack ctx
before: 35144 2136 660
after: 35144 (+0.0%) 2136 (+0.0%) 660 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
gbmap before: 38380 2144 776
gbmap after: 38380 (+0.0%) 2144 (+0.0%) 776 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
preerase before: 38920 2168 796
preerase after: 38920 (+0.0%) 2168 (+0.0%) 796 (+0.0%)
The main change is adding LFS3_M_REVPERTURB, which will be necessary for
preerase allocations, but I got distracted and ended up giving the
revision count subsystem a bit of a refactor.
Main changes:
- Added LFS3_M_REVPERTURB, which ensures the leading bit in the
revision count changes after each allocation/relocation/compaction.
This is generally optional, but will be required for preerase
allocations. Our ecksum system is only reliable if we ensure at least
one bit changes, otherwise the chance of ecksum collision is very
high.
The downside of LFS3_M_REVPERTURB is that we need to read the contents
of the new block to figure out what the bit should change to. Probably
a minimal cost in the system, but still a good reason to make the
behavior optional.
Does LFS3_M_REVPERTURB have any use outside of preerased allocation?
I'm not sure. Maybe it has some niche use reducing the chance of bd
ECC collisions?
- Dropped LFS3_M_REVDBG, but adding low-effort debug bits that are
always enabled.
Making LFS3_M_REVDBG conditional was probably overkill. The flag
checks probably cost more than the actual debug bits when enabled.
Instead, replaced with a simpler, low-effort debug bit system, where
we only set the debug bits during mdir allocation/relocation. These
bits shouldn't change during normal compaction, but we _don't_
introduce debug bits if mounting a filesystem from a driver without
these debug bits.
- Restricted recycle counter to at most 20-bits to make space for
things. This ensures perturb/debug bits don't get overwritten (though
we really only care about perturb bits).
2^20 (~1M) recycles is probably enough for any device littlefs will
run on, especially considering the recycle_count should probably be
several orders of magnitude smaller than the device's expected erase
cycles.
Worst case this can always be increased in the future without
backwards incompatible changes. The only hard requirement for revision
counts is that the full 32-bits are comparable.
- Simplified lfs3_rev_inc and friends, and moved most of the
disk-dependent revision count stuff down into lfs3_rbyd appendrev.
This deduplicates the messy revision count handling in
lfs3_btree_commit_.
Though note the implicit lfs3_rbyd_appendrev now defaults to writing
the btree debug bits ('b'). A bit of a hack, but works for littlefs.
Here's the resulting encoding:
vvvv---- -------- -------- -ddddddd
vvvvrrrr rrrrrr-- -------- -ddddddd
vvvvrrrr rrrrrrnn nnnnnnnn pddddddd
'-.''----.----''----.----' ^'--.--'
'------|----------|------|---|---- 4-bit relocation revision
'----------|------|---|---- recycle-bits recycle counter
'------|---|---- pseudorandom noise (if revnoise)
'---|---- perturb bit (if revperturb)
'---- low-effort debug bits
11-1--- - h = mroot anchor
11-11-1 - m = mdir
11---1- - b = btree node
Note we store revision counts as le32s, so the perturb bit should end up
as the leading bit in the first byte.
Costs a bit more code (mostly because the debug bits are now
unconditional, even if low-effort), but simplifies the codebase:
code stack ctx
before: 35124 2136 660
after: 35144 (+0.1%) 2136 (+0.0%) 660 (+0.0%)
after+yesrevperturb: 35192 (+0.2%) 2136 (+0.0%) 660 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
gbmap+np before: 38252 2144 776
gbmap+np after: 38272 (+0.1%) 2144 (+0.0%) 776 (+0.0%)
gbmap+np after+yrp: 38328 (+0.2%) 2144 (+0.0%) 776 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
gbmap+yp before: 38832 2168 796
gbmap+yp after: 38852 (+0.1%) 2168 (+0.0%) 796 (+0.0%)
gbmap+yp after+yrp: 38908 (+0.2%) 2168 (+0.0%) 796 (+0.0%)
This is hopefully a better alternative to LFS3_IFDEF_YES_* macros.
If we need special behavior for LFS3_IFDEF_YES_*, we almost always need
special behavior for LFS3_IFDEF_NO_* and LFS3_IFDEF_MAYBE_* as well.
So merging all three states into a single macro saves typing and
hopefully encourages correct handling of all cases.
No code changes.
Allocating pre-erased blocks gets quite complicated due to our
restricted flash model, but at least the actual pre-erasing is
relatively straightforward:
- We keep track of known preerased state in lfs3->gbmap.preeraser.
- If LFS3_GC_PREERASE is provided during gc work, we increment the
preeraser's known window by scanning the gbmap.
- Any BMFREE ranges we find, we erase a block at a time, and store the
resulting ecksum in a BMERASED range in the gbmap.
- We keep track of how many blocks we erased, and stop early if this
exceeds cfg.gc_preerase_count. This just lets users tune how many
blocks to preerase in case something (?) prevents preerased blocks
from being used.
Some notes:
- We don't really do anything with ranges in lfs3_alloc_preerase. In
theory we could bulk in erase to minimize the number of commits to the
gbmap, but we expect erase to dominate, so this probably isn't worth
it.
And if erase doesn't dominate, why would you bother pre-erasing
blocks?
- Preerasing isn't really a traversal operation, and is managed by a
sort of secondary state machine in lfs3_fs_gc_.
This also means lfs3_trv_read with LFS3_T_PREERASE does nothing, but I
guess that is ok? It's tempting to try to make lfs3_trv_read also
preerase, but it's unclear what block it should return -- it's
probably the wrong API.
- Introducing ecksums actually went quite a bit smoother than I
expected. Though it helps ecksums are the only optional payload, no
type punning or anything.
Ecksums do muddy the gbmap's design a bit, unfortunately. The main
issue being that we can only merge BMERASED ranges with equal ecksums.
This makes BMERASED ranges less compressable than the others, and may
be one reason to limit cfg.gc_preerase_count.
However:
1. This is where I think it's useful to emphasize that the gbmap's
responsibility is to track _free_ blocks, in-use blocks are
secondary.
When allocating, we're going to stop at the first BMFREE/BMERASED,
but may need to skip over an unbounded number of BMINUSE/BMBAD
blocks. So the compressability of BMFREE/BMERASED ranges should
have less of an impact on block allocation.
2. In practice, most flash uses consistent erase values, so the
resulting ecksums will probably be compressable. The exceptions are
noop-erases (SD/eMMC, RAM, NVRAM, etc), and encryption with block
address permutation?
Though noop-erases are a pretty big exception.
Code changes:
code stack ctx
before: 35116 2136 660
after: 35116 (+0.0%) 2136 (+0.0%) 660 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
gbmap+np before: 38040 2136 776
gbmap+np after: 38188 (+0.4%) 2144 (+0.4%) 776 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
gbmap+yp before: 38040 2136 776
gbmap+yp after: 38608 (+1.5%) 2144 (+0.4%) 796 (+2.6%)
LFS3_REVDBG introduced a lot of overhead for something I'm not sure
anyone will actually use (I have enough tooling that the state of an
rbyd is rarely a mystery, see dbgbmap.py). That, and we're running out
of flags!
So this reduces LFS3_REVDBG to just store one of "himb" in the first
(lowest) byte of the revision count; information that is easily
available:
vvvv---- -------- -------- --------
vvvvrrrr rrrrrr-- -------- --------
vvvvrrrr rrrrrrnn nnnnnnnn nnnnnnnn
vvvvrrrr rrrrrrnn nnnnnnnn dddddddd
'-.''----.----''----.- - - '---.--'
'------|----------|----------|---- 4-bit relocation revision
'----------|----------|---- recycle-bits recycle counter
'----------|---- pseudorandom noise (if revnoise)
'---- h, i, m, or b (if revdbg)
-11-1--- - h = mroot anchor
-11-1--1 - i = mroot
-11-11-1 - m = mdir
-11---1- - b = btree node
Some other notes:
- Enabled LFS3_REVDBG and LFS3_REVNOISE to work together, now that
LFS3_REVDBG doesn't consume all unused rev bits.
Note that LFS3_REVDBG has priority over LFS3_REVNOISE, but _not_
recycle-bits, etc. Otherwise problems would happen for recycle-bits
>2^20 (though do we care?).
- Fixed an issue where using the gcksum as a noise source results in
noise=0 when there is only an mroot. This is due to how we xor out
the current mdir cksum during an mdir commit.
Fixed by using gcksum_p instead of gcksum.
- Added missing LFS3_I_REVDBG/REVNOISE flags in the tests, so now you
can actually run the tests with LFS3_REVDBG/REVNOISE (this probably
just fell out-of-date at some point).
---
Curiously, despite LFS3_REVDBG/REVNOISE being disabled by default, this
did save some code. I'm guessing the non-tail-call mtree/gbmap commit
functions prevented some level of inlining?:
code stack ctx
before: 35964 2280 660
after: 35964 (+0.0%) 2280 (+0.0%) 660 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
gbmap before: 38940 2296 772
gbmap after: 38828 (-0.3%) 2296 (+0.0%) 772 (+0.0%)
This is motivated by the observation that the O(n log_b n) btree
iteration really just hasn't been a bottleneck in our benchmarks.
Our write performance is mostly dominated by compaction costs, and while
filesystem _traversals_ are a concern, it's easy to explicitly track
rbyds in lfs3_btrv_t.
Additionally:
- We track mdirs during mtree iteration, which are the true mtree
leaves.
- We already cache file leaves, i.e. bptrs and read-fragments.
On top of this, leaf caching adds complexity, both in terms of
code/stack costs, but also in terms of reliability. It introducing the
need for cache invalidation, which is infamously one of the two hard
problems in computer science!
This is the second(?) time btree leaf traversals have been reverted, so
see previous commit messages for even more arguments against.
---
Eventually, we should probably just delete the btree leaf cache logic to
avoid the maintenance headache (cache invalidation + opt+in/less
testing = ouch). But I want to do a bit more benchmarking comparing the
two modes, so just moving this behind an ifdef for now.
Saves code, and of course RAM:
code stack ctx
before btrv: 37160 2352 688
before: 37088 (-0.2%) 2384 (+1.4%) 688 (+0.0%)
after: 36480 (-1.8%) 2304 (-2.0%) 660 (-4.1%)
But note while this keeps the performance implications of btree leaf
caching, it does not keep the code/stack optimizations that internally
reuse the leaf cache for things (btrv, lookupnext_ rbyd side-channel,
etc).
In _theory_ these could have been kept with enough ifdefs, but it would
have made the codebase quite a bit of a hell to maintain:
code stack ctx
always-bleafcache: 37160 2352 688
no-bleafcache: 36480 (-1.8%) 2304 (-2.0%) 660 (-4.1%)
yes-bleafcache: 37044 (-0.3%) 2384 (+1.4%) 688 (+0.0%)
Gbmap mode has even more savings due to how many gbmap copies we have
flying around:
code stack ctx
gbmap + always-bleafcache: 40132 2368 856
gbmap + no-bleafcache: 39464 (-1.7%) 2320 (-2.0%) 772 (-9.8%)
gbmap + yes-bleafcache: 40052 (-0.2%) 2400 (+1.4%) 856 (+0.0%)
---
In the future, _maybe_ we can revisit this. But I think a better design
would be to cache btree leaves globally, in lfs3_t, similarly to the
theoretical mdir cache. This would allow a user-configurable number of
cached btree nodes, and may make cache invalidation easier.
Note, however, that btree nodes don't need to be fetched (even for
commits now!), so the benefits would be much smaller than for the
theoretical mdir cache.
But hey, it would defend the lack of low-level rbyd tracking during
iteration/rattr queries!
I think these are good ideas to bring back when littlefs3 is more
mature, but at the moment the number of different builds is creating too
much friction.
LFS3_KVONLY and LFS3_2BONLY in particular _add_ significant chunks of
code (lfs3_file_readget_, lfs3_file_flushset_, and various extra logic
sprinkled throughout the codebase), and the current state of testing
means I have no idea if any of it still works.
These are also low-risk for introducing any disk related changes.
So, ripping out for now to keep the current experimental development
tractable. May reintroduce in the future (probably after littlefs3 is
stabilized) if there is sufficient user interest. But doing so will
probably also need to come with actual testing in CI.
Having gbmap/bmap used in different places for the same thing was
confusing. Preferring gbmap as it is consistent with other gstate (grm
queue, gcksums), even if it is a bit noisy.
It's interesting to note what didn't change:
- The BM* range tags: LFS3_TAG_BMFREE, etc. These already differs from
the GBMAP* prefix enough, and adopting GBM* would risk confusion for
actual gstate.
- The gbmap revdbg string: "bb~r". We don't have enough characters for
anything else!
- dbgbmap.py/dbgbmapsvg.py. These aren't actually related to the gbmap,
so the name difference is a good thing.
TLDR: This drops the idea of different bmap strategies/modes, and sorts
out most of the compile-time/runtime conditional bmap interactions.
---
Motivation: Benchmarking (at least up to the 32-bit word limit) has
shown the bmap will unlikely be a significant bottleneck, even on large
disks. The largest disks tend to be NAND, and NAND's ridiculous block
size limits pressure on block allocation.
There are still concerns for areas I haven't measured yet:
- SD/eMMC/FTL - Small blocks, so more pressure on block allocation. In
theory the logical block size can be artificially increased, but this
comes with a granularity tradeoff.
- I've only measured throughput, latency is a whole other story.
However, users have reported lfs3_fs_gc is useful for mitigating this,
so maybe latency is less of a concern now?
But while there may still be room for improvement via alternative bmap
strategies, the risk a concerning amount of complexity. Yes,
configuration gets more complicated, but the real issue is any bmap
strategies that try to track _deallocations_ (the original idea being
treediffing) risk falling leaking blocks if all cases aren't covered.
The current "bmap cache" strategy strikes a really nice balance where it
reduces _amortized_ block allocation -> ~O(log n) without RAM, while
retaining the safe, bug-resistant, single-source-of-truth properties
that come with lookahead-based allocation.
---
So, long story short, dropping other strategies, and now the presence of
the bmap is a boolean flag.
This is also the first format-specific flag:
- Define LFS3_BMAP to enable the bmap logic, but note by default the
bmap will still not be used.
- Define LFS3_YES_BMAP to force the bmap to be used.
- With LFS3_BMAP, passing LFS3_F_GBMAP to lfs3_format will include the
on-disk block-map.
- No flag is needed during mount, the presence of the bmap is determined
by the on-disk wcompat flags (LFS3_WCOMPAT_GBMAP). This also prevents
rw mounting if the bmap is not supported, but rdonly mounting is
allowed.
- Users can check if the bmap is in use via lfs3_fs_stat, which reports
LFS3_I_GBMAP in the flags field.
There's still some missing pieces, but these will be a bit more
involved:
- lfs3_fs_grow needs to be made bmap aware!
- We probably want something like lfs3_fs_mkgbmap and lfs3_fs_rmgbmap to
allow converting between bmap backed/not-backed filesystem images.
Code changes minimal:
code stack ctx
before: 37172 2352 684
after: 37172 (+0.0%) 2352 (+0.0%) 684 (+0.0%)
code stack ctx
bmap before: 38844 2456 800
bmap after: 38852 (+0.0%) 2456 (+0.0%) 800 (+0.0%)
Previously this had a very naive number of parens, which led to a very
confusing night trying to debug some code that looked roughly like this:
LFS3_MAX(1, (false) ? 64 : 256) => 1 ???
Fixed by adding more parens.
Currently LFS3_BMAP implies LFS3_YES_BMAP, which is an ugly hack because
I don't want to figure out the BMAP flag logic right now.
As a side-effect, this makes it impossible to test LFS3_BIGGEST without
LFS3_BMAP, which breaks a number of tests that have not been updated to
support >2 format blocks.
The idea behind separate ctrled+unctrled airspaces was to try to avoid
multiple interpretations of the on-disk bmap, but I'm starting to think
this adds more complexity than it solves.
The main conflict is the meaning of "in-flight" blocks. When using the
"uncontrolled" bmap algorithm, in-flight blocks need to be
double-checked by traversing the filesystem. But in the "controlled"
bmap algorithm, blocks are only marked as "in-flight" while they are
truly in-flight (in-use in RAM, but not yet in use on disk).
Representing these both with the same "in-flight" state risks
incompatible algorithms misinterpreting the bmap across different
mounts.
In theory the separate airspaces solve this, but now all the algorithms
need to know how to convert the bmap from different modes, adding
complexity and code cost.
Well, in theory at least. I'm unsure separate airspaces actually solves
this due to subtleties between what "in-flight" means in the different
algorithms (note both in-use and free blocks are "in-flight" in the
unknown airspace!). It really depends on how the "controlled" algorithm
actually works, which isn't implemented/fully designed yet.
---
Long story short, due to a time crunch, I'm ripping this out for now and
just storing the current algorithm in the wcompat flags:
LFS3_WCOMPAT_GBMAP 0x00006000 Global block-map in use
LFS3_WCOMPAT_GBMAPNONE 0x00000000 Gbmap not in use
LFS3_WCOMPAT_GBMAPCACHE 0x00002000 Gbmap in cache mode
LFS3_WCOMPAT_GBMAPVFR 0x00004000 Gbmap in VFR mode
LFS3_WCOMPAT_GBMAPIFR 0x00006000 Gbmap in IFR mode
Note GBMAPVFR/IFR != BMAPSLOW/FAST! At least BMAPSLOW/FAST can share
bmap representations:
- GBMAPVFR => Uncontrolled airspace, i.e. in-flight blocks may or may
not be in use, need to traverse open files.
- GBMAPIFR => Controlled airspace, i.e. in-flight blocks are in use,
at least until powerloss, no traversal needed, but requires more bmap
writes.
- BMAPSLOW => Treediff by checking what blocks are in B but not in A,
and what blocks are in A but not in B, O(n^2), but minimizes bmap
updates.
Can be optimized with a bloom filter.
- BMAPFAST => Treediff by clearing all blocks in A, and then setting all
blocks in B, O(n), but also writes all blocks to the bmap twice even
on small changes.
Can be optimized with a sliding bitmap window (or a block hashtable,
though a bitmap converges to the same thing in both algorithms when
>=disk_size).
It will probably be worth unifying the bmap representation later (the
more algorithm-specific flags there are, the harder interop becomes for
users, but for now this opens a path to implementing/experimenting with
bmap algorithms without dealing with this headache.
Note this includes both the lfs3_config -> lfs3_cfg structs as well as
the LFS3_CONFIG -> LFS3_CFG include define:
- LFS3_CONFIG -> LFS3_CFG
- struct lfs3_config -> struct lfs3_cfg
- struct lfs3_file_config -> struct lfs3_file_cfg
- struct lfs3_*bd_config -> struct lfs3_*bd_cfg
- cfg -> cfg
We were already using cfg as the variable name everywhere. The fact that
these names were different was an inconsistency that should be fixed
since we're committing to an API break.
LFS3_CFG is already out-of-date from upstream, and there's plans for a
config rework, but I figured I'd go ahead and change it as well to lower
the chances it gets overlooked.
---
Note this does _not_ affect LFS3_TAG_CONFIG. Having the on-disk vs
driver-level config take slightly different names is not a bad thing.
LFS3_CKDATACKSUMREADS is just too much.
The downside is it may not be clear how LFS3_CKDATACKSUMREADS interacts
with the future planned LFS3_CKREADS (LFS3_CKREADS implies
LFS3_CKDATACKSUMS + LFS3_CKMETAREDUND), but on the flip side you may
actually be able to type LFS3_CKDATACKSUMS on the first try.
Like LFS3_RDONLY and LFS3_KVONLY, LFS3_2BONLY opts-out of all of the
logic necessary for filesystems larger than 2-blocks (the mimimum size
of a mutable littlefs image).
This has potential for some pretty big savings:
- No block allocation
- No lookahead buffer
- No btrees (but yes bshrubs)
- No bptrs
- No mtree traversal
Which is I guess ~1/4 of the codebase:
code stack ctx
default: 37836 2416 636
2bonly: 27704 (-26.8%) 1872 (-22.5%) 592 (-6.9%)
This can be combined with LFS3_KVONLY for a small key-value store
compatible with the full littlefs driver:
code stack ctx
default: 37836 2416 636
kvonly: 30792 (-18.6%) 2168 (-10.3%) 636 (+0.0%)
kvonly+2bonly: 22900 (-39.5%) 1736 (-28.1%) 592 (-6.9%)
It may be possible to optimize this further, but, as is the case with
LFS3_KVONLY, balancing config-specific optimization vs maintainability
is tricky.
---
I'm not sure why, but this also reduced the default build's size a bit.
Compiler noise?
code stack ctx
before: 37860 2416 636
after: 37836 (-0.1%) 2416 (+0.0%) 636 (+0.0%)
One of the ideas behind the key-value API is that it is potentially much
cheaper than a full file API. With the key-value API, we get the
guarantee that all data must fit in RAM, and avoid headaches like
random reads/writes and needing to broadcast file state.
For an example of just how much complexity is avoided, the see the
difference between lfs3_file_flushonce_ vs the mess that is
lfs3_file_flush_ + lfs3_file_crystallize + lfs3_file_graft.
However, littlefs is designed around files, and a couple design
decisions hold back how much code saving is possible:
1. littlefs's shrubs are designed around being enrolled in the omdir
linked-list, so internally we still have most of the file open/close
code lumbering around.
2. Directories and traversals still exist, so we'd need the omdir
linked-list anyways, and we still need to broadcast _some_ changes.
3. Despite being intended for small amounts of data, lfs3_set/get can
still be used to create arbitrarily large files. So we still need all
of the bshrub/btree logic.
Which we still need for the mtree anyways, so this isn't really that
much of a downside.
It also may be possible to save more code by aggressively rewriting the
_entire_ read/write path for lfs3_set/get, to not reuse any of the
existing file logic in LFS3_KVONLY mode. But I decided against this due
to concerns around maintainability.
The duplicate lfs3_file_read + lfs3_file_readonce and lfs3_file_flush_ +
lfs3_file_flushonce_ are already enough of a concern.
Anyways, here's LFS3_KVONLY:
code stack ctx
default: 37824 2416 636
kvonly: 30936 (-18.2%) 2168 (-10.3%) 636 (+0.0%)
LFS3_RDONLY + LFS3_KVONLY is also interesting:
code stack ctx
rdonly: 10776 856 508
rdonly+kvonly: 9904 (-8.1%) 888 (+3.7%) 508 (+0.0%)
---
This also added some noise to the default build's code, mainly due to
tweaks in lfs3_file_readnext to allow better reuse in LFS3_KVONLY:
code stack ctx
before: 37824 2416 636
after: 37860 (+0.1%) 2416 (+0.0%) 636 (+0.0%)
This is the new readonly flag, to be consistent with LFS3_M_RDONLY and
friends.
Note this overlaps with LFS3_YES_RDONLY in a weird way, where
LFS3_YES_RDONLY is basically just an alias for LFS3_RDONLY. For most
flags, LFS3_THING enables the _option_ of using LFS3_M_THING, with
LFS3_YES_THING implying LFS3_M_THING in all mount calls. But
LFS3_RDONLY _disables_ the option of using LFS3_M_RDWR, so it's a bit
different...
Do we really need two flags for the same thing? Not sure. But most users
probably expect LFS3_RDONLY coming from other filesystems.
Worst case this can be revisited in the planned config API rework.
---
As for the readonly code size, this is just the first draft and limited
to mostly ifdefing out all prog/write logic paths. There's some TODOs in
the code that may save a bit more (rbyd.eoff, file.b.shrub_ for
example). But the results are looking ok:
code stack ctx
v2.11.0 rdonly: 6270 448 580
v3-alpha rdonly: 10776 (+71.9%) 840 (+87.5%) 524 (-9.7%)
It's interesting to note most of the additional code/stack cost come
from filesystem traversal. In v2, the threaded linked-list made rdonly
traversal _incredibly_ cheap. But the extra rdwr baggage of turning
littlefs into a fully connected graph made it something to be avoided
in v3.
This hits v3 with the double whammy of:
1. Filesystem traversal is more complicated since we need to keep track
of which btree and where in the btree we are
2. Everything needs to be tracked explicitly due to the new inverted
state-machine driven API (no callbacks)
Note that even if we disabled the traversal APIs, lfs3_fs_usage, cksum
checking, etc, we'd still need to traverse to rebuild gstate. Otherwise
we risk showing grmed files after a powerloss.
---
This did affect the default build a little bit, due to moving things
around for nicer ifdef groupings:
code stack ctx
default before: 37300 2280 636
default after: 37304 (+0.0%) 2280 (+0.0%) 636 (+0.0%)
Christopher Haster