btrfs: optimize fill_holes() to merge a new hole with both adjacent items

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fill_holes() currently merges a punched hole with either the previous
or the next file extent item, but never both in the same call.  When
holes are punched in a non-sequential order this leaves consecutive
hole items in the inode's subvolume tree that should have been collapsed
into a single one.

This is a minor metadata optimization that reduces the number of file
extent items when holes are punched in non-sequential order. While
having extra file extent items is harmless and has no functional
impact, reducing metadata overhead can benefit workloads with heavily
fragmented hole patterns.

For example:

  fallocate -p -o 4K  -l 4K ${FILE}
  fallocate -p -o 12K -l 4K ${FILE}
  fallocate -p -o 8K  -l 4K ${FILE}

After the third punch the [4K, 8K) and [12K, 16K) holes become
adjacent to the new [8K, 12K) hole, but fill_holes() merges only one
side and leaves two separate hole items ([4K, 12K) and [12K, 16K))
instead of the expected single [4K, 16K) hole item.

Fix this by checking both path->slots[0] - 1 and path->slots[0] in one
pass:

  - If only the previous slot is mergeable, extend it forward as
    before.
  - If only the next slot is mergeable, extend it backward and update
    its key offset as before.
  - If both are mergeable, extend the previous item to cover the new
    hole plus the next item, and remove the redundant next item with
    btrfs_del_items().

Because the merge path may now delete an item, switch the initial
btrfs_search_slot() call from a plain lookup (ins_len = 0) to a
search-for-deletion (ins_len = -1), so the leaf is prepared for a
possible item removal.

Note: This optimization only applies to filesystems without the
NO_HOLES feature enabled. Since NO_HOLES is now the default, this
primarily benefits older filesystems or those explicitly created with
NO_HOLES disabled.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chen <davechen@synology.com>
Reviewed-by: Filipe Manana <fdmanana@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Filipe Manana <fdmanana@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>

...

This commit is contained in:

Dave Chen 2026-05-04 09:43:56 +08:00 • committed by David Sterba

parent 83f7e52b7e

commit 022568f8d5

1 changed files with 32 additions and 17 deletions

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fs/btrfs/file.c

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