user/sven/linux.git/include/linux/backing-dev.h, branch v3.18.28

bdi: reimplement bdev_inode_switch_bdi()

2014-09-08T16:00:43Z

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 Cc: Alexander Viro Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

bdi: remove unused stuff

2014-09-08T16:00:36Z

Two flags and one bdi_writeback field are no longer used. Remove them. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

bdi: avoid oops on device removal

2014-04-03T23:20:49Z

After commit 839a8e8660b6 ("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: 839a8e8660b6777e7fe4e80af1a048aebe2b5977 Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo Signed-off-by: Jan Kara Cc: Derek Basehore Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

bdi: test bdi_init failure

2013-11-08T15:59:44Z

There were two places where return value from bdi_init was not tested. Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka Acked-by: Tejun Heo Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

mm/page-writeback.c: add strictlimit feature

2013-09-11T22:58:04Z

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 Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Miklos Szeredi Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Pavel Emelyanov Cc: James Bottomley Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: replace custom worker pool implementation with unbound workqueue

2013-04-02T02:08:06Z

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 Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Fengguang Wu Cc: Jeff Moyer

writeback: remove unused bdi_pending_list

2013-04-02T02:08:06Z

There's no user left. Remove it. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Fengguang Wu

bdi: allow block devices to say that they require stable page writes

2013-02-22T01:22:19Z

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 Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Cc: Adrian Hunter Cc: Andy Lutomirski Cc: Artem Bityutskiy Cc: Joel Becker Cc: Mark Fasheh Cc: Steven Whitehouse Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen Cc: Ron Minnich Cc: Latchesar Ionkov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

bdi_register: add __printf verification, fix arg mismatch

2012-12-13T14:13:07Z

__printf is useful to verify format and arguments. Signed-off-by: Joe Perches Reviewed-by: Alex Elder

vfs: kill write_super and sync_supers

2012-08-03T21:24:44Z

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 Signed-off-by: Al Viro