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littlefs/tests
Christopher Haster 9ed326f3d3 Adopted file->leaf, reworked how we track crystallization
TLDR: Added file->leaf, which can track file fragments (read only) and
blocks independently from file->b.shrub. This speeds up linear
read/write performance at a heavy code/stack cost.

The jury is still out on if this ends up reverted.

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This is another change motivated by benchmarking, specifically the
significant regression in linear reads.

The problem is that CTZ skip-lists are actually _really_ good at
appending blocks! (but only appending blocks) The entire state of the
file is contained in the last block, so file writes can resume without
any reads. With B-trees, we need at least 1 B-tree lookup to resume
appending, and this really adds up when writing extremely blocks.

To try to mitigate this, I added file->leaf, a single in-RAM bptr for
tracking the most recent leaf we've operated on. This avoids B-tree
lookups during linear reads, and allowing the leaf to fall out-of-sync
with the B-tree avoids both B-tree lookups and commits during writes.

Unfortunately this isn't a complete win for writes. If we write
fragments, i.e. cache_size < prog_size, we still need to incrementally
commit to the B-tree. Fragments are a bit annoying for caching as any
B-tree commit can discard the block they reside on.

For reading, however, this brings read performance back to roughly the
same as CTZ skip-lists.

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This also turned into more-or-less a full rewrite of the lfsr_file_flush
-> lfsr_file_crystallize code path, which is probably a good thing. This
code needed some TLC.

file->leaf also replaces the previous eblock/eoff mechanism for
erased-state tracking via the new LFSR_BPTR_ISERASED flag. This should
be useful when exploring more erased-state tracking mechanisms (ddtree).

Unfortunately, all of this additional in-RAM state is very costly. I
think there's some cleanup that can be done (the current impl is a bit
of a mess/proof-of-concept), but this does add a significant chunk of
both code and stack:

           code          stack          ctx
  before: 36016           2296          636
  after:  37228 (+3.4%)   2328 (+1.4%)  636 (+0.0%)

file->leaf also increases the size of lfsr_file_t, but this doesn't show
up in ctx because struct lfs_info dominates:

  lfsr_file_t before: 116
  lfsr_file_t after:  136 (+17.2%)

Hm... Maybe ctx measurements should use a lower LFS_NAME_MAX?
2025-05-23 12:15:13 -05:00
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2025-04-30 00:57:17 -05:00