Commit Graph

241 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Paul Gortmaker
0db0628d90 kernel: delete __cpuinit usage from all core kernel files
The __cpuinit type of throwaway sections might have made sense
some time ago when RAM was more constrained, but now the savings
do not offset the cost and complications.  For example, the fix in
commit 5e427ec2d0 ("x86: Fix bit corruption at CPU resume time")
is a good example of the nasty type of bugs that can be created
with improper use of the various __init prefixes.

After a discussion on LKML[1] it was decided that cpuinit should go
the way of devinit and be phased out.  Once all the users are gone,
we can then finally remove the macros themselves from linux/init.h.

This removes all the uses of the __cpuinit macros from C files in
the core kernel directories (kernel, init, lib, mm, and include)
that don't really have a specific maintainer.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/5/20/589

Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
2013-07-14 19:36:59 -04:00
Darrick J. Wong
7136851117 mm: make snapshotting pages for stable writes a per-bio operation
Walking a bio's page mappings has proved problematic, so create a new
bio flag to indicate that a bio's data needs to be snapshotted in order
to guarantee stable pages during writeback.  Next, for the one user
(ext3/jbd) of snapshotting, hook all the places where writes can be
initiated without PG_writeback set, and set BIO_SNAP_STABLE there.

We must also flag journal "metadata" bios for stable writeout, since
file data can be written through the journal.  Finally, the
MS_SNAP_STABLE mount flag (only used by ext3) is now superfluous, so get
rid of it.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: rename _submit_bh()'s `flags' to `bio_flags', delobotomize the _submit_bh declaration]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: teeny cleanup]
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-04-29 15:54:33 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
de1a2262b0 Merge tag 'writeback-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux
Pull writeback fixes from Wu Fengguang:
 "Two writeback fixes

   - fix negative (setpoint - dirty) in 32bit archs

   - use down_read_trylock() in writeback_inodes_sb(_nr)_if_idle()"

* tag 'writeback-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux:
  Negative (setpoint-dirty) in bdi_position_ratio()
  vfs: re-implement writeback_inodes_sb(_nr)_if_idle() and rename them
2013-02-28 13:21:44 -08:00
Linus Torvalds
ee89f81252 Merge branch 'for-3.9/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block
Pull block IO core bits from Jens Axboe:
 "Below are the core block IO bits for 3.9.  It was delayed a few days
  since my workstation kept crashing every 2-8h after pulling it into
  current -git, but turns out it is a bug in the new pstate code (divide
  by zero, will report separately).  In any case, it contains:

   - The big cfq/blkcg update from Tejun and and Vivek.

   - Additional block and writeback tracepoints from Tejun.

   - Improvement of the should sort (based on queues) logic in the plug
     flushing.

   - _io() variants of the wait_for_completion() interface, using
     io_schedule() instead of schedule() to contribute to io wait
     properly.

   - Various little fixes.

  You'll get two trivial merge conflicts, which should be easy enough to
  fix up"

Fix up the trivial conflicts due to hlist traversal cleanups (commit
b67bfe0d42: "hlist: drop the node parameter from iterators").

* 'for-3.9/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block: (39 commits)
  block: remove redundant check to bd_openers()
  block: use i_size_write() in bd_set_size()
  cfq: fix lock imbalance with failed allocations
  drivers/block/swim3.c: fix null pointer dereference
  block: don't select PERCPU_RWSEM
  block: account iowait time when waiting for completion of IO request
  sched: add wait_for_completion_io[_timeout]
  writeback: add more tracepoints
  block: add block_{touch|dirty}_buffer tracepoint
  buffer: make touch_buffer() an exported function
  block: add @req to bio_{front|back}_merge tracepoints
  block: add missing block_bio_complete() tracepoint
  block: Remove should_sort judgement when flush blk_plug
  block,elevator: use new hashtable implementation
  cfq-iosched: add hierarchical cfq_group statistics
  cfq-iosched: collect stats from dead cfqgs
  cfq-iosched: separate out cfqg_stats_reset() from cfq_pd_reset_stats()
  blkcg: make blkcg_print_blkgs() grab q locks instead of blkcg lock
  block: RCU free request_queue
  blkcg: implement blkg_[rw]stat_recursive_sum() and blkg_[rw]stat_merge()
  ...
2013-02-28 12:52:24 -08:00
Paul Szabo
75f7ad8e04 page-writeback.c: subtract min_free_kbytes from dirtyable memory
When calculating amount of dirtyable memory, min_free_kbytes should be
subtracted because it is not intended for dirty pages.

Addresses http://bugs.debian.org/695182

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix up min_free_kbytes extern declarations]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix min() warning]
Signed-off-by: Paul Szabo <psz@maths.usyd.edu.au>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.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>
2013-02-23 17:50:17 -08:00
Darrick J. Wong
ffecfd1a72 block: optionally snapshot page contents to provide stable pages during write
This provides a band-aid to provide stable page writes on jbd without
needing to backport the fixed locking and page writeback bit handling
schemes of jbd2.  The band-aid works by using bounce buffers to snapshot
page contents instead of waiting.

For those wondering about the ext3 bandage -- fixing the jbd locking
(which was done as part of ext4dev years ago) is a lot of surgery, and
setting PG_writeback on data pages when we actually hold the page lock
dropped ext3 performance by nearly an order of magnitude.  If we're
going to migrate iscsi and raid to use stable page writes, the
complaints about high latency will likely return.  We might as well
centralize their page snapshotting thing to one place.

Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Tested-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>
Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich@sandia.gov>
Cc: Latchesar Ionkov <lucho@ionkov.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-02-21 17:22:20 -08:00
Darrick J. Wong
1d1d1a7672 mm: only enforce stable page writes if the backing device requires it
Create a helper function to check if a backing device requires stable
page writes and, if so, performs the necessary wait.  Then, make it so
that all points in the memory manager that handle making pages writable
use the helper function.  This should provide stable page write support
to most filesystems, while eliminating unnecessary waiting for devices
that don't require the feature.

Before this patchset, all filesystems would block, regardless of whether
or not it was necessary.  ext3 would wait, but still generate occasional
checksum errors.  The network filesystems were left to do their own
thing, so they'd wait too.

After this patchset, all the disk filesystems except ext3 and btrfs will
wait only if the hardware requires it.  ext3 (if necessary) snapshots
pages instead of blocking, and btrfs provides its own bdi so the mm will
never wait.  Network filesystems haven't been touched, so either they
provide their own stable page guarantees or they don't block at all.
The blocking behavior is back to what it was before 3.0 if you don't
have a disk requiring stable page writes.

Here's the result of using dbench to test latency on ext2:

3.8.0-rc3:
 Operation      Count    AvgLat    MaxLat
 ----------------------------------------
 WriteX        109347     0.028    59.817
 ReadX         347180     0.004     3.391
 Flush          15514    29.828   287.283

Throughput 57.429 MB/sec  4 clients  4 procs  max_latency=287.290 ms

3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
 WriteX        105556     0.029     4.273
 ReadX         335004     0.005     4.112
 Flush          14982    30.540   298.634

Throughput 55.4496 MB/sec  4 clients  4 procs  max_latency=298.650 ms

As you can see, the maximum write latency drops considerably with this
patch enabled.  The other filesystems (ext3/ext4/xfs/btrfs) behave
similarly, but see the cover letter for those results.

Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com>
Cc: Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>
Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich@sandia.gov>
Cc: Latchesar Ionkov <lucho@ionkov.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-02-21 17:22:19 -08:00
Clark Williams
8bd75c77b7 sched/rt: Move rt specific bits into new header file
Move rt scheduler definitions out of include/linux/sched.h into
new file include/linux/sched/rt.h

Signed-off-by: Clark Williams <williams@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20130207094707.7b9f825f@riff.lan
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
2013-02-07 20:51:08 +01:00
paul.szabo@sydney.edu.au
ed84825b78 Negative (setpoint-dirty) in bdi_position_ratio()
In bdi_position_ratio(), get difference (setpoint-dirty) right even when
negative. Both setpoint and dirty are unsigned long, the difference was
zero-padded thus wrongly sign-extended to s64. This issue affects all
32-bit architectures, does not affect 64-bit architectures where long
and s64 are equivalent.

In this function, dirty is between freerun and limit, the pseudo-float x
is between [-1,1], expected to be negative about half the time. With
zero-padding, instead of a small negative x we obtained a large positive
one so bdi_position_ratio() returned garbage.

Casting the difference to s64 also prevents overflow with left-shift;
though normally these numbers are small and I never observed a 32-bit
overflow there.

(This patch does not solve the PAE OOM issue.)

Paul Szabo   psz@maths.usyd.edu.au   http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/
School of Mathematics and Statistics   University of Sydney    Australia

Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reported-by: Paul Szabo <psz@maths.usyd.edu.au>
Reference: http://bugs.debian.org/695182
Signed-off-by: Paul Szabo <psz@maths.usyd.edu.au>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2013-01-24 22:22:22 +08:00
Tejun Heo
9fb0a7da0c writeback: add more tracepoints
Add tracepoints for page dirtying, writeback_single_inode start, inode
dirtying and writeback.  For the latter two inode events, a pair of
events are defined to denote start and end of the operations (the
starting one has _start suffix and the one w/o suffix happens after
the operation is complete).  These inode ops are FS specific and can
be non-trivial and having enclosing tracepoints is useful for external
tracers.

This is part of tracepoint additions to improve visiblity into
dirtying / writeback operations for io tracer and userland.

v2: writeback_dirty_inode[_start] TPs may be called for files on
    pseudo FSes w/ unregistered bdi.  Check whether bdi->dev is %NULL
    before dereferencing.

v3: buffer dirtying moved to a block TP.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2013-01-14 15:00:36 +01:00
Sonny Rao
c8b74c2f66 mm: fix calculation of dirtyable memory
The system uses global_dirtyable_memory() to calculate number of
dirtyable pages/pages that can be allocated to the page cache.  A bug
causes an underflow thus making the page count look like a big unsigned
number.  This in turn confuses the dirty writeback throttling to
aggressively write back pages as they become dirty (usually 1 page at a
time).  This generally only affects systems with highmem because the
underflowed count gets subtracted from the global count of dirtyable
memory.

The problem was introduced with v3.2-4896-gab8fabd

Fix is to ensure we don't get an underflowed total of either highmem or
global dirtyable memory.

Signed-off-by: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Puneet Kumar <puneetster@chromium.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Tested-by: Damien Wyart <damien.wyart@free.fr>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-12-20 17:40:18 -08:00
Namjae Jeon
d0e1d66b5a writeback: remove nr_pages_dirtied arg from balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr()
There is no reason to pass the nr_pages_dirtied argument, because
nr_pages_dirtied value from the caller is unused in
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr().

Signed-off-by: Namjae Jeon <linkinjeon@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Vivek Trivedi <vtrivedi018@gmail.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>
2012-12-11 17:22:21 -08:00
Srivatsa S. Bhat
2f60d628ff CPU hotplug, writeback: Don't call writeback_set_ratelimit() too often during hotplug
The CPU hotplug callback related to writeback calls writeback_set_ratelimit()
during every state change in the hotplug sequence. This is unnecessary
since num_online_cpus() changes only once during the entire hotplug operation.

So invoke the function only once per hotplug, thereby avoiding the
unnecessary repetition of those costly calculations.

Signed-off-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
2012-09-28 20:27:49 +08:00
Artem Bityutskiy
f0cd2dbb6c vfs: kill write_super and sync_supers
Finally we can kill the 'sync_supers' kernel thread along with the
'->write_super()' superblock operation because all the users are gone.
Now every file-system is supposed to self-manage own superblock and
its dirty state.

The nice thing about killing this thread is that it improves power management.
Indeed, 'sync_supers' is a source of monotonic system wake-ups - it woke up
every 5 seconds no matter what - even if there were no dirty superblocks and
even if there were no file-systems using this service (e.g., btrfs and
journalled ext4 do not need it). So it was wasting power most of the time. And
because the thread was in the core of the kernel, all systems had to have it.
So I am quite happy to make it go away.

Interestingly, this thread is a left-over from the pdflush kernel thread which
was a self-forking kernel thread responsible for all the write-back in old
Linux kernels. It was turned into per-block device BDI threads, and
'sync_supers' was a left-over. Thus, R.I.P, pdflush as well.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2012-08-04 01:24:44 +04:00
Wanpeng Li
331cbdeede writeback: Fix some comment errors
Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li <liwp@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-06-09 19:54:47 +08:00
Jan Kara
eb608e3a34 block: Convert BDI proportion calculations to flexible proportions
Convert calculations of proportion of writeback each bdi does to new flexible
proportion code. That allows us to use aging period of fixed wallclock time
which gives better proportion estimates given the hugely varying throughput of
different devices.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-06-09 08:37:56 +09:00
Fengguang Wu
68809c7108 writeback: initialize global_dirty_limit
This prevents global_dirty_limit from remaining 0 (the initial value)
for long time, since it's only updated in update_dirty_limit() when
above the dirty freerun area.

It will avoid unexpected consequences when some random code use it as a
convenient approximation of the global dirty threshold.

Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-05-06 13:41:58 +08:00
H Hartley Sweeten
18cf8cf8ba mm: page-writeback.c: local functions should not be exposed globally
The function global_dirtyable_memory is only referenced in this file and
should be marked static to prevent it from being exposed globally.

This quiets the sparse warning:

warning: symbol 'global_dirtyable_memory' was not declared. Should it be static?

Signed-off-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-04-14 17:37:27 +08:00
Linus Torvalds
69e1aaddd6 Merge tag 'ext4_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4
Pull ext4 updates for 3.4 from Ted Ts'o:
 "Ext4 commits for 3.3 merge window; mostly cleanups and bug fixes

  The changes to export dirty_writeback_interval are from Artem's s_dirt
  cleanup patch series.  The same is true of the change to remove the
  s_dirt helper functions which never got used by anyone in-tree.  I've
  run these changes by Al Viro, and am carrying them so that Artem can
  more easily fix up the rest of the file systems during the next merge
  window.  (Originally we had hopped to remove the use of s_dirt from
  ext4 during this merge window, but his patches had some bugs, so I
  ultimately ended dropping them from the ext4 tree.)"

* tag 'ext4_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4: (66 commits)
  vfs: remove unused superblock helpers
  mm: export dirty_writeback_interval
  ext4: remove useless s_dirt assignment
  ext4: write superblock only once on unmount
  ext4: do not mark superblock as dirty unnecessarily
  ext4: correct ext4_punch_hole return codes
  ext4: remove restrictive checks for EOFBLOCKS_FL
  ext4: always set then trimmed blocks count into len
  ext4: fix trimmed block count accunting
  ext4: fix start and len arguments handling in ext4_trim_fs()
  ext4: update s_free_{inodes,blocks}_count during online resize
  ext4: change some printk() calls to use ext4_msg() instead
  ext4: avoid output message interleaving in ext4_error_<foo>()
  ext4: remove trailing newlines from ext4_msg() and ext4_error() messages
  ext4: add no_printk argument validation, fix fallout
  ext4: remove redundant "EXT4-fs: " from uses of ext4_msg
  ext4: give more helpful error message in ext4_ext_rm_leaf()
  ext4: remove unused code from ext4_ext_map_blocks()
  ext4: rewrite punch hole to use ext4_ext_remove_space()
  jbd2: cleanup journal tail after transaction commit
  ...
2012-03-28 10:02:55 -07:00
Artem Bityutskiy
91913a2942 mm: export dirty_writeback_interval
Export 'dirty_writeback_interval' to make it visible to
file-systems. We are going to push superblock management down to
file-systems and get rid of the 'sync_supers' kernel thread completly.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
2012-03-21 22:33:00 -04:00
Fengguang Wu
47a133339c mm: use global_dirty_limit in throttle_vm_writeout()
When starting a memory hog task, a desktop box w/o swap is found to go
unresponsive for a long time.  It's solely caused by lots of congestion
waits in throttle_vm_writeout():

 gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073384: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
 gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073386: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000
           gtali-4237 553.080377: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
           gtali-4237 553.080378: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000
            Xorg-3483 553.103375: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
            Xorg-3483 553.103377: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000

The root cause is, the dirty threshold is knocked down a lot by the memory
hog task.  Fixed by using global_dirty_limit which decreases gradually on
such events and can guarantee we stay above (the also decreasing) nr_dirty
in the progress of following down to the new dirty threshold.

Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-03-21 17:54:58 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
001a541ea9 Merge branch 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux
* 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux:
  writeback: move MIN_WRITEBACK_PAGES to fs-writeback.c
  writeback: balanced_rate cannot exceed write bandwidth
  writeback: do strict bdi dirty_exceeded
  writeback: avoid tiny dirty poll intervals
  writeback: max, min and target dirty pause time
  writeback: dirty ratelimit - think time compensation
  btrfs: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writes
  writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirty
  writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writes
  writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasks
  writeback: Include all dirty inodes in background writeback
2012-01-10 16:59:59 -08:00
Johannes Weiner
a756cf5908 mm: try to distribute dirty pages fairly across zones
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>
2012-01-10 16:30:43 -08:00
Johannes Weiner
ccafa2879f mm: writeback: cleanups in preparation for per-zone dirty limits
The next patch will introduce per-zone dirty limiting functions in
addition to the traditional global dirty limiting.

Rename determine_dirtyable_memory() to global_dirtyable_memory() before
adding the zone-specific version, and fix up its documentation.

Also, move the functions to determine the dirtyable memory and the
function to calculate the dirty limit based on that together so that their
relationship is more apparent and that they can be commented on as a
group.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
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>
2012-01-10 16:30:43 -08:00
Johannes Weiner
ab8fabd46f mm: exclude reserved pages from dirtyable memory
Per-zone dirty limits try to distribute page cache pages allocated for
writing across zones in proportion to the individual zone sizes, to reduce
the likelihood of reclaim having to write back individual pages from the
LRU lists in order to make progress.

This patch:

The amount of dirtyable pages should not include the full number of free
pages: there is a number of reserved pages that the page allocator and
kswapd always try to keep free.

The closer (reclaimable pages - dirty pages) is to the number of reserved
pages, the more likely it becomes for reclaim to run into dirty pages:

       +----------+ ---
       |   anon   |  |
       +----------+  |
       |          |  |
       |          |  -- dirty limit new    -- flusher new
       |   file   |  |                     |
       |          |  |                     |
       |          |  -- dirty limit old    -- flusher old
       |          |                        |
       +----------+                       --- reclaim
       | reserved |
       +----------+
       |  kernel  |
       +----------+

This patch introduces a per-zone dirty reserve that takes both the lowmem
reserve as well as the high watermark of the zone into account, and a
global sum of those per-zone values that is subtracted from the global
amount of dirtyable pages.  The lowmem reserve is unavailable to page
cache allocations and kswapd tries to keep the high watermark free.  We
don't want to end up in a situation where reclaim has to clean pages in
order to balance zones.

Not treating reserved pages as dirtyable on a global level is only a
conceptual fix.  In reality, dirty pages are not distributed equally
across zones and reclaim runs into dirty pages on a regular basis.

But it is important to get this right before tackling the problem on a
per-zone level, where the distance between reclaim and the dirty pages is
mostly much smaller in absolute numbers.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix highmem build]
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.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>
2012-01-10 16:30:43 -08:00