Dear OpenAFS team, I'm Sushil Pandey, a Computer Science engineering student with experience in Linux kernel development, particularly in memory management subsystems. I'm writing to express my interest in the "OpenAFS Linux kernel module: Multi-page folio support" GSoC project.
During my previous internship, I worked on optimizing page cache utilization for a custom storage driver, which gave me hands-on experience with the Linux kernel's memory subsystem and folio API transitions. I've also contributed patches to fix memory leaks in the NFS client code, which required understanding similar VFS interfaces that OpenAFS interacts with. I've been analyzing the OpenAFS codebase, specifically the memory management in afs/LINUX/osi_vm.c and afs/LINUX/osi_file.c, and see several opportunities where multi-page folios could improve performance, particularly in the readpage/writepage implementations and during bulk data transfers. I believe the afs_linux_storeproc() and afs_linux_fillpages() functions are key candidates for optimizing with multi-page folios. I have some specific questions regarding implementation details: 1. Has OpenAFS considered an incremental approach where multi-page folios are first implemented for read operations before tackling the more complex write paths with their consistency requirements? 2. Are there specific benchmarks or workloads you're targeting for performance improvements with multi-page folios, such as large sequential reads or specific application patterns? 3. How should the implementation handle kernel version compatibility, particularly for kernels before 5.16 where folio support was still evolving? Should we maintain parallel code paths or use feature detection? I've already started drafting a 12-week timeline for this project, dividing the work into analysis, implementation, and testing phases with specific milestones for each component of the file system. I would greatly appreciate your feedback on this timeline and any guidance on critical areas that should receive priority attention. Thank you for considering my interest in this project. I'm excited about the opportunity to contribute to OpenAFS's performance on modern Linux kernels. -- *Warm regards,Sushil Pandey*
