For the planned cgroup writeback support, on each bdi
(backing_dev_info), each memcg will be served by a separate wb
(bdi_writeback). This patch updates bdi so that a bdi can host
multiple wbs (bdi_writebacks).
On the default hierarchy, blkcg implicitly enables memcg. This allows
using memcg's page ownership for attributing writeback IOs, and every
memcg - blkcg combination can be served by its own wb by assigning a
dedicated wb to each memcg. This means that there may be multiple
wb's of a bdi mapped to the same blkcg. As congested state is per
blkcg - bdi combination, those wb's should share the same congested
state. This is achieved by tracking congested state via
bdi_writeback_congested structs which are keyed by blkcg.
bdi->wb remains unchanged and will keep serving the root cgroup.
cgwb's (cgroup wb's) for non-root cgroups are created on-demand or
looked up while dirtying an inode according to the memcg of the page
being dirtied or current task. Each cgwb is indexed on bdi->cgwb_tree
by its memcg id. Once an inode is associated with its wb, it can be
retrieved using inode_to_wb().
Currently, none of the filesystems has FS_CGROUP_WRITEBACK and all
pages will keep being associated with bdi->wb.
v3: inode_attach_wb() in account_page_dirtied() moved inside
mapping_cap_account_dirty() block where it's known to be !NULL.
Also, an unnecessary NULL check before kfree() removed. Both
detected by the kbuild bot.
v2: Updated so that wb association is per inode and wb is per memcg
rather than blkcg.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: kbuild test robot <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
cgroup writeback requires support from both bdi and filesystem sides.
Add BDI_CAP_CGROUP_WRITEBACK and FS_CGROUP_WRITEBACK to indicate
support and enable BDI_CAP_CGROUP_WRITEBACK on block based bdi's by
default. Also, define CONFIG_CGROUP_WRITEBACK which is enabled if
both MEMCG and BLK_CGROUP are enabled.
inode_cgwb_enabled() which determines whether a given inode's both bdi
and fs support cgroup writeback is added.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Currently, a wb's (bdi_writeback) congestion state is carried in its
->state field; however, cgroup writeback support will require multiple
wb's sharing the same congestion state. This patch separates out
congestion state into its own struct - struct bdi_writeback_congested.
A new field wb field, wb_congested, points to its associated congested
struct. The default wb, bdi->wb, always points to bdi->wb_congested.
While this patch adds a layer of indirection, it doesn't introduce any
behavior changes.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Now that bdi definitions are moved to backing-dev-defs.h,
backing-dev.h can include blkdev.h and inline inode_to_bdi() without
worrying about introducing circular include dependency. The function
gets called from hot paths and fairly trivial.
This patch makes inode_to_bdi() and sb_is_blkdev_sb() that the
function calls inline. blockdev_superblock and noop_backing_dev_info
are EXPORT_GPL'd to allow the inline functions to be used from
modules.
While at it, make sb_is_blkdev_sb() return bool instead of int.
v2: Fixed typo in description as suggested by Jan.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
With the planned cgroup writeback support, backing-dev related
declarations will be more widely used across block and cgroup;
unfortunately, including backing-dev.h from include/linux/blkdev.h
makes cyclic include dependency quite likely.
This patch separates out backing-dev-defs.h which only has the
essential definitions and updates blkdev.h to include it. c files
which need access to more backing-dev details now include
backing-dev.h directly. This takes backing-dev.h off the common
include dependency chain making it a lot easier to use it across block
and cgroup.
v2: fs/fat build failure fixed.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Currently, a bdi (backing_dev_info) embeds single wb (bdi_writeback)
and the role of the separation is unclear. For cgroup support for
writeback IOs, a bdi will be updated to host multiple wb's where each
wb serves writeback IOs of a different cgroup on the bdi. To achieve
that, a wb should carry all states necessary for servicing writeback
IOs for a cgroup independently.
This patch moves bdi->wb_lock and ->worklist into wb.
* The lock protects bdi->worklist and bdi->wb.dwork scheduling. While
moving, rename it to wb->work_lock as wb->wb_lock is confusing.
Also, move wb->dwork downwards so that it's colocated with the new
->work_lock and ->work_list fields.
* bdi_writeback_workfn() -> wb_workfn()
bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed(bdi) -> wb_wakeup_delayed(wb)
bdi_wakeup_thread(bdi) -> wb_wakeup(wb)
bdi_queue_work(bdi, ...) -> wb_queue_work(wb, ...)
__bdi_start_writeback(bdi, ...) -> __wb_start_writeback(wb, ...)
get_next_work_item(bdi) -> get_next_work_item(wb)
* bdi_wb_shutdown() is renamed to wb_shutdown() and now takes @wb.
The function contained parts which belong to the containing bdi
rather than the wb itself - testing cap_writeback_dirty and
bdi_remove_from_list() invocation. Those are moved to
bdi_unregister().
* bdi_wb_{init|exit}() are renamed to wb_{init|exit}().
Initializations of the moved bdi->wb_lock and ->work_list are
relocated from bdi_init() to wb_init().
* As there's still only one bdi_writeback per backing_dev_info, all
uses of bdi->state are mechanically replaced with bdi->wb.state
introducing no behavior changes.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Currently, a bdi (backing_dev_info) embeds single wb (bdi_writeback)
and the role of the separation is unclear. For cgroup support for
writeback IOs, a bdi will be updated to host multiple wb's where each
wb serves writeback IOs of a different cgroup on the bdi. To achieve
that, a wb should carry all states necessary for servicing writeback
IOs for a cgroup independently.
This patch moves bandwidth related fields from backing_dev_info into
bdi_writeback.
* The moved fields are: bw_time_stamp, dirtied_stamp, written_stamp,
write_bandwidth, avg_write_bandwidth, dirty_ratelimit,
balanced_dirty_ratelimit, completions and dirty_exceeded.
* writeback_chunk_size() and over_bground_thresh() now take @wb
instead of @bdi.
* bdi_writeout_fraction(bdi, ...) -> wb_writeout_fraction(wb, ...)
bdi_dirty_limit(bdi, ...) -> wb_dirty_limit(wb, ...)
bdi_position_ration(bdi, ...) -> wb_position_ratio(wb, ...)
bdi_update_writebandwidth(bdi, ...) -> wb_update_write_bandwidth(wb, ...)
[__]bdi_update_bandwidth(bdi, ...) -> [__]wb_update_bandwidth(wb, ...)
bdi_{max|min}_pause(bdi, ...) -> wb_{max|min}_pause(wb, ...)
bdi_dirty_limits(bdi, ...) -> wb_dirty_limits(wb, ...)
* Init/exits of the relocated fields are moved to bdi_wb_init/exit()
respectively. Note that explicit zeroing is dropped in the process
as wb's are cleared in entirety anyway.
* As there's still only one bdi_writeback per backing_dev_info, all
uses of bdi->stat[] are mechanically replaced with bdi->wb.stat[]
introducing no behavior changes.
v2: Typo in description fixed as suggested by Jan.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk@kernel.org>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Currently, a bdi (backing_dev_info) embeds single wb (bdi_writeback)
and the role of the separation is unclear. For cgroup support for
writeback IOs, a bdi will be updated to host multiple wb's where each
wb serves writeback IOs of a different cgroup on the bdi. To achieve
that, a wb should carry all states necessary for servicing writeback
IOs for a cgroup independently.
This patch moves bdi->bdi_stat[] into wb.
* enum bdi_stat_item is renamed to wb_stat_item and the prefix of all
enums is changed from BDI_ to WB_.
* BDI_STAT_BATCH() -> WB_STAT_BATCH()
* [__]{add|inc|dec|sum}_wb_stat(bdi, ...) -> [__]{add|inc}_wb_stat(wb, ...)
* bdi_stat[_error]() -> wb_stat[_error]()
* bdi_writeout_inc() -> wb_writeout_inc()
* stat init is moved to bdi_wb_init() and bdi_wb_exit() is added and
frees stat.
* As there's still only one bdi_writeback per backing_dev_info, all
uses of bdi->stat[] are mechanically replaced with bdi->wb.stat[]
introducing no behavior changes.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@primarydata.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Currently, a bdi (backing_dev_info) embeds single wb (bdi_writeback)
and the role of the separation is unclear. For cgroup support for
writeback IOs, a bdi will be updated to host multiple wb's where each
wb serves writeback IOs of a different cgroup on the bdi. To achieve
that, a wb should carry all states necessary for servicing writeback
IOs for a cgroup independently.
This patch moves bdi->state into wb.
* enum bdi_state is renamed to wb_state and the prefix of all enums is
changed from BDI_ to WB_.
* Explicit zeroing of bdi->state is removed without adding zeoring of
wb->state as the whole data structure is zeroed on init anyway.
* As there's still only one bdi_writeback per backing_dev_info, all
uses of bdi->state are mechanically replaced with bdi->wb.state
introducing no behavior changes.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: drbd-dev@lists.linbit.com
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Alasdair Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
Cc: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
bdi_unregister() now contains very little functionality.
It contains a "WARN_ON" if bdi->dev is NULL. This warning is of no
real consequence as bdi->dev isn't needed by anything else in the function,
and it triggers if
blk_cleanup_queue() -> bdi_destroy()
is called before bdi_unregister, which happens since
Commit: 6cd18e711d ("block: destroy bdi before blockdev is unregistered.")
So this isn't wanted.
It also calls bdi_set_min_ratio(). This needs to be called after
writes through the bdi have all been flushed, and before the bdi is destroyed.
Calling it early is better than calling it late as it frees up a global
resource.
Calling it immediately after bdi_wb_shutdown() in bdi_destroy()
perfectly fits these requirements.
So bdi_unregister() can be discarded with the important content moved to
bdi_destroy(), as can the
writeback_bdi_unregister
event which is already not used.
Reported-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org (v4.0)
Fixes: c4db59d31e ("fs: don't reassign dirty inodes to default_backing_dev_info")
Fixes: 6cd18e711d ("block: destroy bdi before blockdev is unregistered.")
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Tested-by: Nicholas Moulin <nicholas.w.moulin@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Pull lazytime mount option support from Al Viro:
"Lazytime stuff from tytso"
* 'lazytime' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs:
ext4: add optimization for the lazytime mount option
vfs: add find_inode_nowait() function
vfs: add support for a lazytime mount option
Add a new mount option which enables a new "lazytime" mode. This mode
causes atime, mtime, and ctime updates to only be made to the
in-memory version of the inode. The on-disk times will only get
updated when (a) if the inode needs to be updated for some non-time
related change, (b) if userspace calls fsync(), syncfs() or sync(), or
(c) just before an undeleted inode is evicted from memory.
This is OK according to POSIX because there are no guarantees after a
crash unless userspace explicitly requests via a fsync(2) call.
For workloads which feature a large number of random write to a
preallocated file, the lazytime mount option significantly reduces
writes to the inode table. The repeated 4k writes to a single block
will result in undesirable stress on flash devices and SMR disk
drives. Even on conventional HDD's, the repeated writes to the inode
table block will trigger Adjacent Track Interference (ATI) remediation
latencies, which very negatively impact long tail latencies --- which
is a very big deal for web serving tiers (for example).
Google-Bug-Id: 18297052
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Now that default_backing_dev_info is not used for writeback purposes we can
git rid of it easily:
- instead of using it's name for tracing unregistered bdi we just use
"unknown"
- btrfs and ceph can just assign the default read ahead window themselves
like several other filesystems already do.
- we can assign noop_backing_dev_info as the default one in alloc_super.
All filesystems already either assigned their own or
noop_backing_dev_info.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Now that we got rid of the bdi abuse on character devices we can always use
sb->s_bdi to get at the backing_dev_info for a file, except for the block
device special case. Export inode_to_bdi and replace uses of
mapping->backing_dev_info with it to prepare for the removal of
mapping->backing_dev_info.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Since "BDI: Provide backing device capability information [try #3]" the
backing_dev_info structure also provides flags for the kind of mmap
operation available in a nommu environment, which is entirely unrelated
to it's original purpose.
Introduce a new nommu-only file operation to provide this information to
the nommu mmap code instead. Splitting this from the backing_dev_info
structure allows to remove lots of backing_dev_info instance that aren't
otherwise needed, and entirely gets rid of the concept of providing a
backing_dev_info for a character device. It also removes the need for
the mtd_inodefs filesystem.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Brian Norris <computersforpeace@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
This bdi flag isn't too useful - we can determine that a vma is backed by
either swap or shmem trivially in the caller.
This also allows removing the backing_dev_info instaces for swap and shmem
in favor of noop_backing_dev_info.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
A block_device may be attached to different gendisks and thus
different bdis over time. bdev_inode_switch_bdi() is used to switch
the associated bdi. The function assumes that the inode could be
dirty and transfers it between bdis if so. This is a bit nasty in
that it reaches into bdi internals.
This patch reimplements the function so that it writes out the inode
if dirty. This is a lot simpler and can be implemented without
exposing bdi internals.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Two flags and one bdi_writeback field are no longer used. Remove
them.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
After commit 839a8e8660 ("writeback: replace custom worker pool
implementation with unbound workqueue") when device is removed while we
are writing to it we crash in bdi_writeback_workfn() ->
set_worker_desc() because bdi->dev is NULL.
This can happen because even though bdi_unregister() cancels all pending
flushing work, nothing really prevents new ones from being queued from
balance_dirty_pages() or other places.
Fix the problem by clearing BDI_registered bit in bdi_unregister() and
checking it before scheduling of any flushing work.
Fixes: 839a8e8660
Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Derek Basehore <dbasehore@chromium.org>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
There were two places where return value from bdi_init was not tested.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
The feature prevents mistrusted filesystems (ie: FUSE mounts created by
unprivileged users) to grow a large number of dirty pages before
throttling. For such filesystems balance_dirty_pages always check bdi
counters against bdi limits. I.e. even if global "nr_dirty" is under
"freerun", it's not allowed to skip bdi checks. The only use case for now
is fuse: it sets bdi max_ratio to 1% by default and system administrators
are supposed to expect that this limit won't be exceeded.
The feature is on if a BDI is marked by BDI_CAP_STRICTLIMIT flag. A
filesystem may set the flag when it initializes its BDI.
The problematic scenario comes from the fact that nobody pays attention to
the NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP counter (i.e. number of pages under fuse
writeback). The implementation of fuse writeback releases original page
(by calling end_page_writeback) almost immediately. A fuse request queued
for real processing bears a copy of original page. Hence, if userspace
fuse daemon doesn't finalize write requests in timely manner, an
aggressive mmap writer can pollute virtually all memory by those temporary
fuse page copies. They are carefully accounted in NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP, but
nobody cares.
To make further explanations shorter, let me use "NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP
problem" as a shortcut for "a possibility of uncontrolled grow of amount
of RAM consumed by temporary pages allocated by kernel fuse to process
writeback".
The problem was very easy to reproduce. There is a trivial example
filesystem implementation in fuse userspace distribution: fusexmp_fh.c. I
added "sleep(1);" to the write methods, then recompiled and mounted it.
Then created a huge file on the mount point and run a simple program which
mmap-ed the file to a memory region, then wrote a data to the region. An
hour later I observed almost all RAM consumed by fuse writeback. Since
then some unrelated changes in kernel fuse made it more difficult to
reproduce, but it is still possible now.
Putting this theoretical happens-in-the-lab thing aside, there is another
thing that really hurts real world (FUSE) users. This is write-through
page cache policy FUSE currently uses. I.e. handling write(2), kernel
fuse populates page cache and flushes user data to the server
synchronously. This is excessively suboptimal. Pavel Emelyanov's patches
("writeback cache policy") solve the problem, but they also make resolving
NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP problem absolutely necessary. Otherwise, simply copying
a huge file to a fuse mount would result in memory starvation. Miklos,
the maintainer of FUSE, believes strictlimit feature the way to go.
And eventually putting FUSE topics aside, there is one more use-case for
strictlimit feature. Using a slow USB stick (mass storage) in a machine
with huge amount of RAM installed is a well-known pain. Let's make simple
computations. Assuming 64GB of RAM installed, existing implementation of
balance_dirty_pages will start throttling only after 9.6GB of RAM becomes
dirty (freerun == 15% of total RAM). So, the command "cp 9GB_file
/media/my-usb-storage/" may return in a few seconds, but subsequent
"umount /media/my-usb-storage/" will take more than two hours if effective
throughput of the storage is, to say, 1MB/sec.
After inclusion of strictlimit feature, it will be trivial to add a knob
(e.g. /sys/devices/virtual/bdi/x:y/strictlimit) to enable it on demand.
Manually or via udev rule. May be I'm wrong, but it seems to be quite a
natural desire to limit the amount of dirty memory for some devices we are
not fully trust (in the sense of sustainable throughput).
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix warning in page-writeback.c]
Signed-off-by: Maxim Patlasov <MPatlasov@parallels.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Writeback implements its own worker pool - each bdi can be associated
with a worker thread which is created and destroyed dynamically. The
worker thread for the default bdi is always present and serves as the
"forker" thread which forks off worker threads for other bdis.
there's no reason for writeback to implement its own worker pool when
using unbound workqueue instead is much simpler and more efficient.
This patch replaces custom worker pool implementation in writeback
with an unbound workqueue.
The conversion isn't too complicated but the followings are worth
mentioning.
* bdi_writeback->last_active, task and wakeup_timer are removed.
delayed_work ->dwork is added instead. Explicit timer handling is
no longer necessary. Everything works by either queueing / modding
/ flushing / canceling the delayed_work item.
* bdi_writeback_thread() becomes bdi_writeback_workfn() which runs off
bdi_writeback->dwork. On each execution, it processes
bdi->work_list and reschedules itself if there are more things to
do.
The function also handles low-mem condition, which used to be
handled by the forker thread. If the function is running off a
rescuer thread, it only writes out limited number of pages so that
the rescuer can serve other bdis too. This preserves the flusher
creation failure behavior of the forker thread.
* INIT_LIST_HEAD(&bdi->bdi_list) is used to tell
bdi_writeback_workfn() about on-going bdi unregistration so that it
always drains work_list even if it's running off the rescuer. Note
that the original code was broken in this regard. Under memory
pressure, a bdi could finish unregistration with non-empty
work_list.
* The default bdi is no longer special. It now is treated the same as
any other bdi and bdi_cap_flush_forker() is removed.
* BDI_pending is no longer used. Removed.
* Some tracepoints become non-applicable. The following TPs are
removed - writeback_nothread, writeback_wake_thread,
writeback_wake_forker_thread, writeback_thread_start,
writeback_thread_stop.
Everything, including devices coming and going away and rescuer
operation under simulated memory pressure, seems to work fine in my
test setup.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
This patchset ("stable page writes, part 2") makes some key
modifications to the original 'stable page writes' patchset. First, it
provides creators (devices and filesystems) of a backing_dev_info a flag
that declares whether or not it is necessary to ensure that page
contents cannot change during writeout. It is no longer assumed that
this is true of all devices (which was never true anyway). Second, the
flag is used to relaxed the wait_on_page_writeback calls so that wait
only occurs if the device needs it. Third, it fixes up the remaining
disk-backed filesystems to use this improved conditional-wait logic to
provide stable page writes on those filesystems.
It is hoped that (for people not using checksumming devices, anyway)
this patchset will give back unnecessary performance decreases since the
original stable page write patchset went into 3.0. Sorry about not
fixing it sooner.
Complaints were registered by several people about the long write
latencies introduced by the original stable page write patchset.
Generally speaking, the kernel ought to allocate as little extra memory
as possible to facilitate writeout, but for people who simply cannot
wait, a second page stability strategy is (re)introduced: snapshotting
page contents. The waiting behavior is still the default strategy; to
enable page snapshotting, a superblock flag (MS_SNAP_STABLE) must be
set. This flag is used to bandaid^Henable stable page writeback on
ext3[1], and is not used anywhere else.
Given that there are already a few storage devices and network FSes that
have rolled their own page stability wait/page snapshot code, it would
be nice to move towards consolidating all of these. It seems possible
that iscsi and raid5 may wish to use the new stable page write support
to enable zero-copy writeout.
Thank you to Jan Kara for helping fix a couple more filesystems.
Per Andrew Morton's request, here are the result of using dbench to measure
latencies 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, for ext2 the maximum write latency decreases from ~60ms
on a laptop hard disk to ~4ms. I'm not sure why the flush latencies
increase, though I suspect that being able to dirty pages faster gives
the flusher more work to do.
On ext4, the average write latency decreases as well as all the maximum
latencies:
3.8.0-rc3:
WriteX 85624 0.152 33.078
ReadX 272090 0.010 61.210
Flush 12129 36.219 168.260
Throughput 44.8618 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=168.276 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 86082 0.141 30.928
ReadX 273358 0.010 36.124
Flush 12214 34.800 165.689
Throughput 44.9941 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=165.722 ms
XFS seems to exhibit similar latency improvements as ext2:
3.8.0-rc3:
WriteX 125739 0.028 104.343
ReadX 399070 0.005 4.115
Flush 17851 25.004 131.390
Throughput 66.0024 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=131.406 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 123529 0.028 6.299
ReadX 392434 0.005 4.287
Flush 17549 25.120 188.687
Throughput 64.9113 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=188.704 ms
...and btrfs, just to round things out, also shows some latency
decreases:
3.8.0-rc3:
WriteX 67122 0.083 82.355
ReadX 212719 0.005 2.828
Flush 9547 47.561 147.418
Throughput 35.3391 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=147.433 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 64898 0.101 71.631
ReadX 206673 0.005 7.123
Flush 9190 47.963 219.034
Throughput 34.0795 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=219.044 ms
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 wait code, 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.
This patchset has been tested on 3.8.0-rc3 on x64 with ext3, ext4, and
xfs. I've spot-checked 3.8.0-rc4 and seem to be getting the same
results as -rc3.
[1] The alternative fixes to ext3 include fixing the locking order and
page bit handling like we did for ext4 (but then why not just use
ext4?), or setting PG_writeback so early that ext3 becomes extremely
slow. I tried that, but the number of write()s I could initiate dropped
by nearly an order of magnitude. That was a bit much even for the
author of the stable page series! :)
This patch:
Creates a per-backing-device flag that tracks whether or not pages must
be held immutable during writeout. Eventually it will be used to waive
wait_for_page_writeback() if nothing requires stable pages.
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.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: 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>
