In the scenario of writing sparse files, the per-inode prealloc list may
be very long, resulting in high overhead for ext4_mb_use_preallocated().
To circumvent this problem, we limit the maximum length of per-inode
prealloc list to 512 and allow users to modify it.

After patching, we observed that the sys ratio of cpu has dropped, and
the system throughput has increased significantly. We created a process
to write the sparse file, and the running time of the process on the
fixed kernel was significantly reduced, as follows:

Running time on unfixed kernel：
[root@TENCENT64 ~]# time taskset 0x01 ./sparse /data1/sparce.dat
real    0m2.051s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m2.026s

Running time on fixed kernel：
[root@TENCENT64 ~]# time taskset 0x01 ./sparse /data1/sparce.dat
real    0m0.471s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.395s

Signed-off-by: Chunguang Xu <brookxu@tencent.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/d7a98178-056b-6db5-6bce-4ead23f4a257@gmail.com


Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>