btrfs: make NOCOW checks for existence of checksums in a range more efficient
Before deciding if we can do a NOCOW write into a range, one of the things
we have to do is check if there are checksum items for that range. We do
that through the btrfs_lookup_csums_list() function, which searches for
checksums and adds them to a list supplied by the caller.
But all we need is to check if there is any checksum, we don't need to
look for all of them and collect them into a list, which requires more
search time in the checksums tree, allocating memory for checksums items
to add to the list, copy checksums from a leaf into those list items,
then free that memory, etc. This is all unnecessary overhead, wasting
mostly CPU time, and perhaps some occasional IO if we need to read from
disk any extent buffers.
So change btrfs_lookup_csums_list() to allow to return immediately in
case it finds any checksum, without the need to add it to a list and read
it from a leaf. This is accomplished by allowing a NULL list parameter and
making the function return 1 if it found any checksum, 0 if it didn't
found any, and a negative value in case of an error.
The following test with fio was used to measure performance:
projects / users / dwmw2 / linux.git / commit