iter13 strace finding: producer thread (mux ISO reader) spends 80%
of wall-clock in state D (NFS RPC wait), doing 207 preads/sec at
103 us each. Pipe is 78 MB/s isolated read; we use ~25 MB/s.
FileSectorSource was using direct per-sector pread (0.21.3 bypass).
That bypass was justified under Phase 2.5 + 0.21.7 producer-poll cap
("32 MiB refill bursts the TCP connection enough to starve the
writer thread"). Both of those conditions are gone now (iter8
baseline: no Phase 2.5, no producer poll cap).
The 4 MiB buffer infrastructure was preserved with #[allow(dead_code)]
in case re-engagement was ever wanted. iter14 just routes the hot
path through buffer_covers + refill + memcpy. Net diff: ~10 LOC of
business logic, 5 unit tests already cover the contract.
Expected: producer's effective read rate jumps from 25 → 60+ MB/s
(matches dd ceiling for 1+ MiB block reads). If consumer side keeps
up, mean mux climbs from 28.7 → 35-50 MB/s. If consumer is now the
cap, we see a clear ceiling around 30-35 and we know where to look
next.
Critically: this change ONLY affects mux-from-ISO. Disc→ISO sweep,
Pass N bad-sector retry, AACS, drive ops, mapfile, recovery — all
untouched (they use DriveSectorSource which is a separate impl).
iter1 baseline (Phase 2.5 + DONTNEED restored) measured at 18.4 MB/s
mean on Civil War remux — well below the rig's 37 MB/s concurrent-r+w
ceiling. Per-sector pread is the producer-side bottleneck: ~50us per
pread on NFS = ~19k preads/sec = effective ceiling near what we see.
The 0.21.3 bypass commit cited an A/B test showing the buffer hurt
throughput on NFS bidirectional workloads. That test was taken under
the 0.21.7 producer polling cap; once the cap is gone, the cap was
the bottleneck, not the buffer. Same invalidation pattern as the
0.21.5 Phase 2.5 revert.
Restored the buffered path. DONTNEED page-cache eviction from 0.21.6
stays intact.
Empirical: isolated NFS read 70 MB/s + write 93 MB/s on the rip1 setup
right now, but mux throughput pinned at 2.7 MB/s on 0.21.5. NOT
environmental — code regression.
Root cause: Phase 1 silently dropped the read-side
posix_fadvise(POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED) eviction that the pre-Phase-1 (0.20.7)
hot path had. Without it, an 85 GB streaming ISO read pins the entire
file in the kernel page cache, starving concurrent MKV writeback. 0.21.2
then also dropped the POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL hint on the same theory,
compounding the regression.
Restored both, per-OS split:
- linux: posix_fadvise(SEQUENTIAL) at open + posix_fadvise(DONTNEED)
on consumed 32 MiB windows
- macos: F_RDADVISE hint at open (kept); drop_window no-op (macOS unified
buffer cache less prone to the pin pathology)
- windows / other: both no-op stubs
Target mux speed restored to 20+ MB/s (per concurrent-NFS math:
70/2 read × 0.73 MKV/ISO ratio ≈ 25 MB/s achievable).
The three tests (multi_sector_read_spanning_buffer_boundary,
backward_seek_rebuffers, partial_buffer_at_eof) were asserting
internal buf_start_lba / buf_len_sectors state. With 0.21.3's
read-path bypass, those fields are no longer mutated. The
byte-level contract assertions (read returns correct bytes for
every scenario the tests cover) remain intact.
The 32 MiB readahead window (0.21.0–0.21.1) regressed mux throughput
on NFS bidirectional workloads vs the pre-Phase-1 0.20.7 baseline
(18 -> 7-8 MB/s). The 0.21.2 4 MiB shrink made it worse (5-6 MB/s).
Both signs point at the application-level buffer itself, not the size.
This commit bypasses the buffer entirely on the read path — every
read_sectors call seeks and pread()s direct to the file. That matches
0.20.7's hot path. Kernel readahead handles the policy; on NFS that
interleaves naturally with concurrent writes on the same TCP
connection.
Buffer state fields and refill/buffer_covers are kept so the
structure is preserved for a future per-source-type policy (e.g. a
local-disk source where batched reads ARE beneficial), and so the
existing tests still exercise that machinery.
Empirical regression observed during 0.21.1 mux test on rip1/unraid-1:
historical 0.20.7 baseline averaged ~18 MB/s mux throughput; 0.21.1
dropped to ~7-8 MB/s flat. Same NFS source + destination, same disc.
Suspect: 32 MiB FileSectorSource readahead + posix_fadvise(SEQUENTIAL)
together saturate the TCP connection on read bursts, starving the
writer thread's concurrent NFS writes (mux reads the source ISO and
writes the MKV over the same connection).
- READAHEAD_BUF_BYTES: 32 MiB -> 4 MiB. Matches NFS rsize=1 MiB * 4
round-trips per refill, interleaves cleanly with writes.
- linux/hint_sequential: now no-op. Kernel's default ~128 KiB
readahead is what we want on NFS-backed ISOs (the dominant case).
Per-OS file stays so we can re-enable a hint cleanly later if a
different path benefits.
Three changes targeting 0.20.9's "muxer never read-stalls on NFS read
latency" invariant:
A. FileSectorSource gets a 32 MiB internal read-ahead buffer
(READAHEAD_BUF_BYTES). Splits out from src/sector/file.rs into
src/io/file_sector_source/ with per-OS open hints (Linux
posix_fadvise(SEQUENTIAL), macOS fcntl(F_RDADVISE) with 64 MiB
cap, Windows TODO stub, BSD/illumos no-op). Backward seeks
rebuffer; partial reads at EOF return only the bytes that exist;
oversize-request bypass for count > BUF_SECTORS.
B. WritebackFile inline #[cfg(target_os = "linux")] blocks split
into per-OS files under src/io/writeback_file/. Linux unchanged
(fallocate KEEP_SIZE, fsync via bounded_syscall). macOS gets a
real F_PREALLOCATE + F_FULLFSYNC impl (was a "skipped (non-linux)"
debug log before). Windows is a stub (FlushFileBuffers via
std sync_all; TODO for SetFileValidData). BSDs/illumos fall back
to std sync_all.
C. New byte_channel module — byte-bounded producer/consumer wrapping
std sync_channel with Mutex/Condvar byte accounting. Sender blocks
when used_bytes + item.byte_size() > capacity. HasByteSize impl
for PesFrame. Default cap BYTE_CHANNEL_DEFAULT_CAPACITY = 64 MiB,
sized to absorb worst-case NFS read p99 (~2 s × UHD peak compressed
~15 MB/s). The mux call site lives in autorip (out of scope here);
this lands the primitive in libfreemkv for autorip to adopt.
Test counts: byte_channel +6, file_sector_source +5, sector::file
round-trip suite (3) preserved. passn_handler_ab.rs A/B fixture
(8 profiles) still green.
precommit.sh libfreemkv: fmt + clippy + test all green on Rust 1.86.
No version bump; no Cargo.lock changes; no forbidden-file edits
(disc/patch.rs, disc/read_error.rs, io/pipeline.rs,
tests/passn_handler_ab.rs).
matthew