Commit 83ba7b071f ("writeback: simplify the write back thread queue")
broke writeback_in_progress() as in that commit we started to remove work
items from the list at the moment we start working on them and not at the
moment they are finished. Thus if the flusher thread was doing some work
but there was no other work queued, writeback_in_progress() returned
false. This could in particular cause unnecessary queueing of background
writeback from balance_dirty_pages() or writeout work from
writeback_sb_if_idle().
This patch fixes the problem by introducing a bit in the bdi state which
indicates that the flusher thread is processing some work and uses this
bit for writeback_in_progress() test.
NOTE: Both callsites of writeback_in_progress() (namely,
writeback_inodes_sb_if_idle() and balance_dirty_pages()) would actually
need a different information than what writeback_in_progress() provides.
They would need to know whether *the kind of writeback they are going to
submit* is already queued. But this information isn't that simple to
provide so let's fix writeback_in_progress() for the time being.
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Whe the first inode for a bdi is marked dirty, we wake up the bdi thread which
should take care of the periodic background write-out. However, the write-out
will actually start only 'dirty_writeback_interval' centisecs later, so we can
delay the wake-up.
This change was requested by Nick Piggin who pointed out that if we delay the
wake-up, we weed out 2 unnecessary contex switches, which matters because
'__mark_inode_dirty()' is a hot-path function.
This patch introduces a new function - 'bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed()', which
sets up a timer to wake-up the bdi thread and returns. So the wake-up is
delayed.
We also delete the timer in bdi threads just before writing-back. And
synchronously delete it when unregistering bdi. At the unregister point the bdi
does not have any users, so no one can arm it again.
Since now we take 'bdi->wb_lock' in the timer, which can execute in softirq
context, we have to use 'spin_lock_bh()' for 'bdi->wb_lock'. This patch makes
this change as well.
This patch also moves the 'bdi_wb_init()' function down in the file to avoid
forward-declaration of 'bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed()'.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
Currently bdi threads use local variable 'last_active' which stores last time
when the bdi thread did some useful work. Move this local variable to 'struct
bdi_writeback'. This is just a preparation for the further patches which will
make the forker thread decide when bdi threads should be killed.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
This patch simplifies bdi code a little by removing the 'pending_list' which is
redundant. Indeed, currently the forker thread ('bdi_forker_thread()') is
working like this:
1. In a loop, fetch all bdi's which have works but have no writeback thread and
move them to the 'pending_list'.
2. If the list is empty, sleep for 5 sec.
3. Otherwise, take one bdi from the list, fork the writeback thread for this
bdi, and repeat the loop.
IOW, it first moves everything to the 'pending_list', then process only one
element, and so on. This patch simplifies the algorithm, which is now as
follows.
1. Find the first bdi which has a work and remove it from the global list of
bdi's (bdi_list).
2. If there was not such bdi, sleep 5 sec.
3. Fork the writeback thread for this bdi and repeat the loop.
IOW, now we find the first bdi to process, process it, and so on. This is
simpler and involves less lists.
The bonus now is that we can get rid of a couple of functions, as well as
remove complications which involve 'rcu_call()' and 'bdi->rcu_head'.
This patch also makes sure we use 'list_add_tail_rcu()', instead of plain
'list_add_tail()', but this piece of code is going to be removed in the next
patch anyway.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
The write-back code mixes words "thread" and "task" for the same things. This
is not a big deal, but still an inconsistency.
hch: a convention I tend to use and I've seen in various places
is to always use _task for the storage of the task_struct pointer,
and thread everywhere else. This especially helps with having
foo_thread for the actual thread and foo_task for a global
variable keeping the task_struct pointer
This patch renames:
* 'bdi_add_default_flusher_task()' -> 'bdi_add_default_flusher_thread()'
* 'bdi_forker_task()' -> 'bdi_forker_thread()'
because bdi threads are 'bdi_writeback_thread()', so these names are more
consistent.
This patch also amends commentaries and makes them refer the forker and bdi
threads as "thread", not "task".
Also, while on it, make 'bdi_add_default_flusher_thread()' declaration use
'static void' instead of 'void static' and make checkpatch.pl happy.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
Move all code for the writeback thread into fs/fs-writeback.c instead of
splitting it over two functions in two files.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
The wb_list member of struct backing_device_info always has exactly one
element. Just use the direct bdi->wb pointer instead and simplify some
code.
Also remove bdi_task_init which is now trivial to prepare for the next
patch.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
First remove items from work_list as soon as we start working on them. This
means we don't have to track any pending or visited state and can get
rid of all the RCU magic freeing the work items - we can simply free
them once the operation has finished. Second use a real completion for
tracking synchronous requests - if the caller sets the completion pointer
we complete it, otherwise use it as a boolean indicator that we can free
the work item directly. Third unify struct wb_writeback_args and struct
bdi_work into a single data structure, wb_writeback_work. Previous we
set all parameters into a struct wb_writeback_args, copied it into
struct bdi_work, copied it again on the stack to use it there. Instead
of just allocate one structure dynamically or on the stack and use it
all the way through the stack.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
bdi_start_writeback now never gets a superblock passed, so we can just remove
that case. And to further untangle the code and flatten the call stack
split it into two trivial helpers for it's two callers.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
This reverts commit e913fc825d.
We are investigating a hang associated with the WB_SYNC_NONE changes,
so revert them for now.
Conflicts:
fs/fs-writeback.c
mm/page-writeback.c
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
Commit 69b62d01 fixed up most of the places where we would enter
busy schedule() spins when disabling the periodic background
writeback. This fixes up the sb timer so that it doesn't get
hammered on with the delay disabled, and ensures that it gets
rearmed if needed when /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
gets modified.
bdi_forker_task() also needs to check for !dirty_writeback_centisecs
and use schedule() appropriately, fix that up too.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
When umount calls sync_filesystem(), we first do a WB_SYNC_NONE
writeback to kick off writeback of pending dirty inodes, then follow
that up with a WB_SYNC_ALL to wait for it. Since umount already holds
the sb s_umount mutex, WB_SYNC_NONE ends up doing nothing and all
writeback happens as WB_SYNC_ALL. This can greatly slow down umount,
since WB_SYNC_ALL writeback is a data integrity operation and thus
a bigger hammer than simple WB_SYNC_NONE. For barrier aware file systems
it's a lot slower.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
noop_backing_dev_info is used only as a flag to mark filesystems that
don't have any backing store, like tmpfs, procfs, spufs, etc.
Signed-off-by: Joern Engel <joern@logfs.org>
Changed the BUG_ON() to a WARN_ON(). Note that adding dirty inodes
to the noop_backing_dev_info is not legal and will not result in
them being flushed, but we already catch this condition in
__mark_inode_dirty() when checking for a registered bdi.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Pretty trivial helper, just sets up the bdi and registers it. An atomic
sequence count is used to ensure that the registered sysfs names are
unique.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
One of the features of laptop-mode is that it forces a writeout of dirty
pages if something else triggers a physical read or write from a device.
The current implementation flushes pages on all devices, rather than only
the one that triggered the flush. This patch alters the behaviour so that
only the recently accessed block device is flushed, preventing other
disks being spun up for no terribly good reason.
Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett <mjg@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
There's nothing block related about them, the backing device
is used by things like NFS etc as well. This gets rid of the
need to protect such calls by CONFIG_BLOCK.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Sometimes we only want to write pages from a specific super_block,
so allow that to be passed in.
This fixes a problem with commit 56a131dcf7
causing writeback on all super_blocks on a bdi, where we only really
want to sync a specific sb from writeback_inodes_sb().
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
bdi_start_writeback() is currently split into two paths, one for
WB_SYNC_NONE and one for WB_SYNC_ALL. Add bdi_sync_writeback()
for WB_SYNC_ALL writeback and let bdi_start_writeback() handle
only WB_SYNC_NONE.
Push down the writeback_control allocation and only accept the
parameters that make sense for each function. This cleans up
the API considerably.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Now that bdi_writeback_all() no longer handles integrity writeback,
it doesn't have to block anymore. This means that we can switch
bdi_list reader side protection to RCU.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Also a debugging aid. We want to catch dirty inodes being added to
backing devices that don't do writeback.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
This enables us to track who does what and print info. Its main use
is catching dirty inodes on the default_backing_dev_info, so we can
fix that up.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
This gets rid of pdflush for bdi writeout and kupdated style cleaning.
pdflush writeout suffers from lack of locality and also requires more
threads to handle the same workload, since it has to work in a
non-blocking fashion against each queue. This also introduces lumpy
behaviour and potential request starvation, since pdflush can be starved
for queue access if others are accessing it. A sample ffsb workload that
does random writes to files is about 8% faster here on a simple SATA drive
during the benchmark phase. File layout also seems a LOT more smooth in
vmstat:
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 1 0 608848 2652 375372 0 0 0 71024 604 24 1 10 48 42
0 1 0 549644 2712 433736 0 0 0 60692 505 27 1 8 48 44
1 0 0 476928 2784 505192 0 0 4 29540 553 24 0 9 53 37
0 1 0 457972 2808 524008 0 0 0 54876 331 16 0 4 38 58
0 1 0 366128 2928 614284 0 0 4 92168 710 58 0 13 53 34
0 1 0 295092 3000 684140 0 0 0 62924 572 23 0 9 53 37
0 1 0 236592 3064 741704 0 0 4 58256 523 17 0 8 48 44
0 1 0 165608 3132 811464 0 0 0 57460 560 21 0 8 54 38
0 1 0 102952 3200 873164 0 0 4 74748 540 29 1 10 48 41
0 1 0 48604 3252 926472 0 0 0 53248 469 29 0 7 47 45
where vanilla tends to fluctuate a lot in the creation phase:
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
1 1 0 678716 5792 303380 0 0 0 74064 565 50 1 11 52 36
1 0 0 662488 5864 319396 0 0 4 352 302 329 0 2 47 51
0 1 0 599312 5924 381468 0 0 0 78164 516 55 0 9 51 40
0 1 0 519952 6008 459516 0 0 4 78156 622 56 1 11 52 37
1 1 0 436640 6092 541632 0 0 0 82244 622 54 0 11 48 41
0 1 0 436640 6092 541660 0 0 0 8 152 39 0 0 51 49
0 1 0 332224 6200 644252 0 0 4 102800 728 46 1 13 49 36
1 0 0 274492 6260 701056 0 0 4 12328 459 49 0 7 50 43
0 1 0 211220 6324 763356 0 0 0 106940 515 37 1 10 51 39
1 0 0 160412 6376 813468 0 0 0 8224 415 43 0 6 49 45
1 1 0 85980 6452 886556 0 0 4 113516 575 39 1 11 54 34
0 2 0 85968 6452 886620 0 0 0 1640 158 211 0 0 46 54
A 10 disk test with btrfs performs 26% faster with per-bdi flushing. A
SSD based writeback test on XFS performs over 20% better as well, with
the throughput being very stable around 1GB/sec, where pdflush only
manages 750MB/sec and fluctuates wildly while doing so. Random buffered
writes to many files behave a lot better as well, as does random mmap'ed
writes.
A separate thread is added to sync the super blocks. In the long term,
adding sync_supers_bdi() functionality could get rid of this thread again.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
This is a first step at introducing per-bdi flusher threads. We should
have no change in behaviour, although sb_has_dirty_inodes() is now
ridiculously expensive, as there's no easy way to answer that question.
Not a huge problem, since it'll be deleted in subsequent patches.
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
