Since per-BDI flusher threads were introduced in 2.6, the pdflush
mechanism is not used any more. But the old interface exported through
/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads still exists and is obviously useless.
For back-compatibility, printk warning information and return 2 to notify
the users that the interface is removed.
Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li <liwp@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Doing iput() from flusher thread (writeback_sb_inodes()) can create problems
because iput() can do a lot of work - for example truncate the inode if it's
the last iput on unlinked file. Some filesystems depend on flusher thread
progressing (e.g. because they need to flush delay allocated blocks to reduce
allocation uncertainty) and so flusher thread doing truncate creates
interesting dependencies and possibilities for deadlocks.
We get rid of iput() in flusher thread by using the fact that I_SYNC inode
flag effectively pins the inode in memory. So if we take care to either hold
i_lock or have I_SYNC set, we can get away without taking inode reference
in writeback_sb_inodes().
As a side effect of these changes, we also fix possible use-after-free in
wb_writeback() because inode_wait_for_writeback() call could try to reacquire
i_lock on the inode that was already free.
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reorder structure writeback_control to remove 8 bytes of padding on 64
bit builds, this shrinks its size from 48 to 40 bytes.
This structure is always on the stack and uses C99 named initialisation,
so should be safe and have a small impact on stack usage.
Signed-off-by: Richard Kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
The maximum number of dirty pages that exist in the system at any time is
determined by a number of pages considered dirtyable and a user-configured
percentage of those, or an absolute number in bytes.
This number of dirtyable pages is the sum of memory provided by all the
zones in the system minus their lowmem reserves and high watermarks, so
that the system can retain a healthy number of free pages without having
to reclaim dirty pages.
But there is a flaw in that we have a zoned page allocator which does not
care about the global state but rather the state of individual memory
zones. And right now there is nothing that prevents one zone from filling
up with dirty pages while other zones are spared, which frequently leads
to situations where kswapd, in order to restore the watermark of free
pages, does indeed have to write pages from that zone's LRU list. This
can interfere so badly with IO from the flusher threads that major
filesystems (btrfs, xfs, ext4) mostly ignore write requests from reclaim
already, taking away the VM's only possibility to keep such a zone
balanced, aside from hoping the flushers will soon clean pages from that
zone.
Enter per-zone dirty limits. They are to a zone's dirtyable memory what
the global limit is to the global amount of dirtyable memory, and try to
make sure that no single zone receives more than its fair share of the
globally allowed dirty pages in the first place. As the number of pages
considered dirtyable excludes the zones' lowmem reserves and high
watermarks, the maximum number of dirty pages in a zone is such that the
zone can always be balanced without requiring page cleaning.
As this is a placement decision in the page allocator and pages are
dirtied only after the allocation, this patch allows allocators to pass
__GFP_WRITE when they know in advance that the page will be written to and
become dirty soon. The page allocator will then attempt to allocate from
the first zone of the zonelist - which on NUMA is determined by the task's
NUMA memory policy - that has not exceeded its dirty limit.
At first glance, it would appear that the diversion to lower zones can
increase pressure on them, but this is not the case. With a full high
zone, allocations will be diverted to lower zones eventually, so it is
more of a shift in timing of the lower zone allocations. Workloads that
previously could fit their dirty pages completely in the higher zone may
be forced to allocate from lower zones, but the amount of pages that
"spill over" are limited themselves by the lower zones' dirty constraints,
and thus unlikely to become a problem.
For now, the problem of unfair dirty page distribution remains for NUMA
configurations where the zones allowed for allocation are in sum not big
enough to trigger the global dirty limits, wake up the flusher threads and
remedy the situation. Because of this, an allocation that could not
succeed on any of the considered zones is allowed to ignore the dirty
limits before going into direct reclaim or even failing the allocation,
until a future patch changes the global dirty throttling and flusher
thread activation so that they take individual zone states into account.
Test results
15M DMA + 3246M DMA32 + 504 Normal = 3765M memory
40% dirty ratio
16G USB thumb drive
10 runs of dd if=/dev/zero of=disk/zeroes bs=32k count=$((10 << 15))
seconds nr_vmscan_write
(stddev) min| median| max
xfs
vanilla: 549.747( 3.492) 0.000| 0.000| 0.000
patched: 550.996( 3.802) 0.000| 0.000| 0.000
fuse-ntfs
vanilla: 1183.094(53.178) 54349.000| 59341.000| 65163.000
patched: 558.049(17.914) 0.000| 0.000| 43.000
btrfs
vanilla: 573.679(14.015) 156657.000| 460178.000| 606926.000
patched: 563.365(11.368) 0.000| 0.000| 1362.000
ext4
vanilla: 561.197(15.782) 0.000|2725438.000|4143837.000
patched: 568.806(17.496) 0.000| 0.000| 0.000
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Tested-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fix compile error
fs/fs-writeback.c:515:33: error: ‘PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT’ undeclared (first use in this function)
Reported-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
De-account the accumulative dirty counters on page redirty.
Page redirties (very common in ext4) will introduce mismatch between
counters (a) and (b)
a) NR_DIRTIED, BDI_DIRTIED, tsk->nr_dirtied
b) NR_WRITTEN, BDI_WRITTEN
This will introduce systematic errors in balanced_rate and result in
dirty page position errors (ie. the dirty pages are no longer balanced
around the global/bdi setpoints).
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
It's a years long problem that a large number of short-lived dirtiers
(eg. gcc instances in a fast kernel build) may starve long-run dirtiers
(eg. dd) as well as pushing the dirty pages to the global hard limit.
The solution is to charge the pages dirtied by the exited gcc to the
other random dirtying tasks. It sounds not perfect, however should
behave good enough in practice, seeing as that throttled tasks aren't
actually running so those that are running are more likely to pick it up
and get throttled, therefore promoting an equal spread.
Randy: fix compile error: 'dirty_throttle_leaks' undeclared in exit.c
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
This creates a new 'reason' field in a wb_writeback_work
structure, which unambiguously identifies who initiates
writeback activity. A 'wb_reason' enumeration has been
added to writeback.h, to enumerate the possible reasons.
The 'writeback_work_class' and tracepoint event class and
'writeback_queue_io' tracepoints are updated to include the
symbolic 'reason' in all trace events.
And the 'writeback_inodes_sbXXX' family of routines has had
a wb_stats parameter added to them, so callers can specify
why writeback is being started.
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609ab ("writeback:
introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits") and make the max-pause
area smaller and safe.
This fixes ~30% performance regression in the ext3 data=writeback
fio_mmap_randwrite_64k/fio_mmap_randrw_64k test cases, where there are
12 JBOD disks, on each disk runs 8 concurrent tasks doing reads+writes.
Using deadline scheduler also has a regression, but not that big as CFQ,
so this suggests we have some write starvation.
The test logs show that
- the disks are sometimes under utilized
- global dirty pages sometimes rush high to the pass-good area for
several hundred seconds, while in the mean time some bdi dirty pages
drop to very low value (bdi_dirty << bdi_thresh). Then suddenly the
global dirty pages dropped under global dirty threshold and bdi_dirty
rush very high (for example, 2 times higher than bdi_thresh). During
which time balance_dirty_pages() is not called at all.
So the problems are
1) The random writes progress so slow that they break the assumption of
the max-pause logic that "8 pages per 200ms is typically more than
enough to curb heavy dirtiers".
2) The max-pause logic ignored task_bdi_thresh and thus opens the possibility
for some bdi's to over dirty pages, leading to (bdi_dirty >> bdi_thresh)
and then (bdi_thresh >> bdi_dirty) for others.
3) The higher max-pause/pass-good thresholds somehow leads to the bad
swing of dirty pages.
The fix is to allow the task to slightly dirty over task_bdi_thresh, but
no way to exceed bdi_dirty and/or global dirty_thresh.
Tests show that it fixed the JBOD regression completely (both behavior
and performance), while still being able to cut down large pause times
in balance_dirty_pages() for single-disk cases.
Reported-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Tested-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Originally, MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES was hard-coded to 1024 because of a
concern of not holding I_SYNC for too long. (At least, that was the
comment previously.) This doesn't make sense now because the only
time we wait for I_SYNC is if we are calling sync or fsync, and in
that case we need to write out all of the data anyway. Previously
there may have been other code paths that waited on I_SYNC, but not
any more. -- Theodore Ts'o
So remove the MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES constraint. The writeback pages
will adapt to as large as the storage device can write within 500ms.
XFS is observed to do IO completions in a batch, and the batch size is
equal to the write chunk size. To avoid dirty pages to suddenly drop
out of balance_dirty_pages()'s dirty control scope and create large
fluctuations, the chunk size is also limited to half the control scope.
The balance_dirty_pages() control scrope is
[(background_thresh + dirty_thresh) / 2, dirty_thresh]
which is by default [15%, 20%] of global dirty pages, whose range size
is dirty_thresh / DIRTY_FULL_SCOPE.
The adpative write chunk size will be rounded to the nearest 4MB
boundary.
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13930
CC: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
CC: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
The max-pause limit helps to keep the sleep time inside
balance_dirty_pages() within MAX_PAUSE=200ms. The 200ms max sleep means
per task rate limit of 8pages/200ms=160KB/s when dirty exceeded, which
normally is enough to stop dirtiers from continue pushing the dirty
pages high, unless there are a sufficient large number of slow dirtiers
(eg. 500 tasks doing 160KB/s will still sum up to 80MB/s, exceeding the
write bandwidth of a slow disk and hence accumulating more and more dirty
pages).
The pass-good limit helps to let go of the good bdi's in the presence of
a blocked bdi (ie. NFS server not responding) or slow USB disk which for
some reason build up a large number of initial dirty pages that refuse
to go away anytime soon.
For example, given two bdi's A and B and the initial state
bdi_thresh_A = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2
Then A get blocked, after a dozen seconds
bdi_thresh_A = 0
bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh
bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2
The (bdi_dirty_B < bdi_thresh_B) test is now useless and the dirty pages
will be effectively throttled by condition (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh).
This has two problems:
(1) we lose the protections for light dirtiers
(2) balance_dirty_pages() effectively becomes IO-less because the
(bdi_nr_reclaimable > bdi_thresh) test won't be true. This is good
for IO, but balance_dirty_pages() loses an important way to break
out of the loop which leads to more spread out throttle delays.
DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA can eliminate the above issues. The only problem is,
DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA needs to be defined as 2 to fully cover the above
example while this patch uses the more conservative value 8 so as not to
surprise people with too many dirty pages than expected.
The max-pause limit won't noticeably impact the speed dirty pages are
knocked down when there is a sudden drop of global/bdi dirty thresholds.
Because the heavy dirties will be throttled below 160KB/s which is slow
enough. It does help to avoid long dirty throttle delays and especially
will make light dirtiers more responsive.
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
The start of a heavy weight application (ie. KVM) may instantly knock
down determine_dirtyable_memory() if the swap is not enabled or full.
global_dirty_limits() and bdi_dirty_limit() will in turn get global/bdi
dirty thresholds that are _much_ lower than the global/bdi dirty pages.
balance_dirty_pages() will then heavily throttle all dirtiers including
the light ones, until the dirty pages drop below the new dirty thresholds.
During this _deep_ dirty-exceeded state, the system may appear rather
unresponsive to the users.
About "deep" dirty-exceeded: task_dirty_limit() assigns 1/8 lower dirty
threshold to heavy dirtiers than light ones, and the dirty pages will
be throttled around the heavy dirtiers' dirty threshold and reasonably
below the light dirtiers' dirty threshold. In this state, only the heavy
dirtiers will be throttled and the dirty pages are carefully controlled
to not exceed the light dirtiers' dirty threshold. However if the
threshold itself suddenly drops below the number of dirty pages, the
light dirtiers will get heavily throttled.
So introduce global_dirty_limit for tracking the global dirty threshold
with policies
- follow downwards slowly
- follow up in one shot
global_dirty_limit can effectively mask out the impact of sudden drop of
dirtyable memory. It will be used in the next patch for two new type of
dirty limits. Note that the new dirty limits are not going to avoid
throttling the light dirtiers, but could limit their sleep time to 200ms.
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
The estimation value will start from 100MB/s and adapt to the real
bandwidth in seconds.
It tries to update the bandwidth only when disk is fully utilized.
Any inactive period of more than one second will be skipped.
The estimated bandwidth will be reflecting how fast the device can
writeout when _fully utilized_, and won't drop to 0 when it goes idle.
The value will remain constant at disk idle time. At busy write time, if
not considering fluctuations, it will also remain high unless be knocked
down by possible concurrent reads that compete for the disk time and
bandwidth with async writes.
The estimation is not done purely in the flusher because there is no
guarantee for write_cache_pages() to return timely to update bandwidth.
The bdi->avg_write_bandwidth smoothing is very effective for filtering
out sudden spikes, however may be a little biased in long term.
The overheads are low because the bdi bandwidth update only occurs at
200ms intervals.
The 200ms update interval is suitable, because it's not possible to get
the real bandwidth for the instance at all, due to large fluctuations.
The NFS commits can be as large as seconds worth of data. One XFS
completion may be as large as half second worth of data if we are going
to increase the write chunk to half second worth of data. In ext4,
fluctuations with time period of around 5 seconds is observed. And there
is another pattern of irregular periods of up to 20 seconds on SSD tests.
That's why we are not only doing the estimation at 200ms intervals, but
also averaging them over a period of 3 seconds and then go further to do
another level of smoothing in avg_write_bandwidth.
CC: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Pass struct wb_writeback_work all the way down to writeback_sb_inodes(),
and initialize the struct writeback_control there.
struct writeback_control is basically designed to control writeback of a
single file, but we keep abuse it for writing multiple files in
writeback_sb_inodes() and its callers.
It immediately clean things up, e.g. suddenly wbc.nr_to_write vs
work->nr_pages starts to make sense, and instead of saving and restoring
pages_skipped in writeback_sb_inodes it can always start with a clean
zero value.
It also makes a neat IO pattern change: large dirty files are now
written in the full 4MB writeback chunk size, rather than whatever
remained quota in wbc->nr_to_write.
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Proposed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Remove two unused struct writeback_control fields:
.encountered_congestion (completely unused)
.nonblocking (never set, checked/showed in XFS,NFS/btrfs)
The .for_background check in nfs_write_inode() is also removed btw,
as .for_background implies WB_SYNC_NONE.
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Proposed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
When wbc.more_io was first introduced, it indicates whether there are
at least one superblock whose s_more_io contains more IO work. Now with
the per-bdi writeback, it can be replaced with a simple b_more_io test.
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
This removes writeback_control.wb_start and does more straightforward
sync livelock prevention by setting .older_than_this to prevent extra
inodes from being enqueued in the first place.
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Split the global inode_wb_list_lock into a per-bdi_writeback list_lock,
as it's currently the most contended lock in the system for metadata
heavy workloads. It won't help for single-filesystem workloads for
which we'll need the I/O-less balance_dirty_pages, but at least we
can dedicate a cpu to spinning on each bdi now for larger systems.
Based on earlier patches from Nick Piggin and Dave Chinner.
It reduces lock contentions to 1/4 in this test case:
10 HDD JBOD, 100 dd on each disk, XFS, 6GB ram
lock_stat version 0.3
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
class name con-bounces contentions waittime-min waittime-max waittime-total acq-bounces acquisitions holdtime-min holdtime-max holdtime-total
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vanilla 2.6.39-rc3:
inode_wb_list_lock: 42590 44433 0.12 147.74 144127.35 252274 886792 0.08 121.34 917211.23
------------------
inode_wb_list_lock 2 [<ffffffff81165da5>] bdev_inode_switch_bdi+0x29/0x85
inode_wb_list_lock 34 [<ffffffff8115bd0b>] inode_wb_list_del+0x22/0x49
inode_wb_list_lock 12893 [<ffffffff8115bb53>] __mark_inode_dirty+0x170/0x1d0
inode_wb_list_lock 10702 [<ffffffff8115afef>] writeback_single_inode+0x16d/0x20a
------------------
inode_wb_list_lock 2 [<ffffffff81165da5>] bdev_inode_switch_bdi+0x29/0x85
inode_wb_list_lock 19 [<ffffffff8115bd0b>] inode_wb_list_del+0x22/0x49
inode_wb_list_lock 5550 [<ffffffff8115bb53>] __mark_inode_dirty+0x170/0x1d0
inode_wb_list_lock 8511 [<ffffffff8115b4ad>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x10f/0x157
2.6.39-rc3 + patch:
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock: 11383 11657 0.14 151.69 40429.51 90825 527918 0.11 145.90 556843.37
------------------------
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 10 [<ffffffff8115b189>] inode_wb_list_del+0x5f/0x86
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 1493 [<ffffffff8115b1ed>] writeback_inodes_wb+0x3d/0x150
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 3652 [<ffffffff8115a8e9>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x123/0x16f
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 1412 [<ffffffff8115a38e>] writeback_single_inode+0x17f/0x223
------------------------
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 3 [<ffffffff8110b5af>] bdi_lock_two+0x46/0x4b
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 6 [<ffffffff8115b189>] inode_wb_list_del+0x5f/0x86
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 2061 [<ffffffff8115af97>] __mark_inode_dirty+0x173/0x1cf
&(&wb->list_lock)->rlock 2629 [<ffffffff8115a8e9>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x123/0x16f
hughd@google.com: fix recursive lock when bdi_lock_two() is called with new the same as old
akpm@linux-foundation.org: cleanup bdev_inode_switch_bdi() comment
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
The flusher works on dirty inodes in batches, and may quit prematurely
if the batch of inodes happen to be metadata-only dirtied: in this case
wbc->nr_to_write won't be decreased at all, which stands for "no pages
written" but also mis-interpreted as "no progress".
So introduce writeback_control.inodes_written to count the inodes get
cleaned from VFS POV. A non-zero value means there are some progress on
writeback, in which case more writeback can be tried.
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
