user/sven/linux.git/include/linux/backing-dev.h, branch v3.9

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

mm: prepare for removal of obsolete /proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads

2012-08-01T01:42:40Z

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 Cc: Wu Fengguang Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

block: Convert BDI proportion calculations to flexible proportions

2012-06-08T23:37:56Z

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 Signed-off-by: Jan Kara Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu

writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_work

2011-10-30T16:33:36Z

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 Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimit

2011-10-03T13:08:57Z

There are some imperfections in balanced_dirty_ratelimit. 1) large fluctuations The dirty_rate used for computing balanced_dirty_ratelimit is merely averaged in the past 200ms (very small comparing to the 3s estimation period for write_bw), which makes rather dispersed distribution of balanced_dirty_ratelimit. It's pretty hard to average out the singular points by increasing the estimation period. Considering that the averaging technique will introduce very undesirable time lags, I give it up totally. (btw, the 3s write_bw averaging time lag is much more acceptable because its impact is one-way and therefore won't lead to oscillations.) The more practical way is filtering -- most singular balanced_dirty_ratelimit points can be filtered out by remembering some prev_balanced_rate and prev_prev_balanced_rate. However the more reliable way is to guard balanced_dirty_ratelimit with task_ratelimit. 2) due to truncates and fs redirties, the (write_bw <=> dirty_rate) match could become unbalanced, which may lead to large systematical errors in balanced_dirty_ratelimit. The truncates, due to its possibly bumpy nature, can hardly be compensated smoothly. So let's face it. When some over-estimated balanced_dirty_ratelimit brings dirty_ratelimit high, dirty pages will go higher than the setpoint. task_ratelimit will in turn become lower than dirty_ratelimit. So if we consider both balanced_dirty_ratelimit and task_ratelimit and update dirty_ratelimit only when they are on the same side of dirty_ratelimit, the systematical errors in balanced_dirty_ratelimit won't be able to bring dirty_ratelimit far away. The balanced_dirty_ratelimit estimation may also be inaccurate near @limit or @freerun, however is less an issue. 3) since we ultimately want to - keep the fluctuations of task ratelimit as small as possible - keep the dirty pages around the setpoint as long time as possible the update policy used for (2) also serves the above goals nicely: if for some reason the dirty pages are high (task_ratelimit < dirty_ratelimit), and dirty_ratelimit is low (dirty_ratelimit < balanced_dirty_ratelimit), there is no point to bring up dirty_ratelimit in a hurry only to hurt both the above two goals. So, we make use of task_ratelimit to limit the update of dirty_ratelimit in two ways: 1) avoid changing dirty rate when it's against the position control target (the adjusted rate will slow down the progress of dirty pages going back to setpoint). 2) limit the step size. task_ratelimit is changing values step by step, leaving a consistent trace comparing to the randomly jumping balanced_dirty_ratelimit. task_ratelimit also has the nice smaller errors in stable state and typically larger errors when there are big errors in rate. So it's a pretty good limiting factor for the step size of dirty_ratelimit. Note that bdi->dirty_ratelimit is always tracking balanced_dirty_ratelimit. task_ratelimit is merely used as a limiting factor. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: dirty rate control

2011-10-03T13:08:56Z

It's all about bdi->dirty_ratelimit, which aims to be (write_bw / N) when there are N dd tasks. On write() syscall, use bdi->dirty_ratelimit ============================================ balance_dirty_pages(pages_dirtied) { task_ratelimit = bdi->dirty_ratelimit * bdi_position_ratio(); pause = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit; sleep(pause); } On every 200ms, update bdi->dirty_ratelimit =========================================== bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit() { task_ratelimit = bdi->dirty_ratelimit * bdi_position_ratio(); balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit * write_bw / dirty_rate; bdi->dirty_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit } Estimation of balanced bdi->dirty_ratelimit =========================================== balanced task_ratelimit ----------------------- balance_dirty_pages() needs to throttle tasks dirtying pages such that the total amount of dirty pages stays below the specified dirty limit in order to avoid memory deadlocks. Furthermore we desire fairness in that tasks get throttled proportionally to the amount of pages they dirty. IOW we want to throttle tasks such that we match the dirty rate to the writeout bandwidth, this yields a stable amount of dirty pages: dirty_rate == write_bw (1) The fairness requirement gives us: task_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit == write_bw / N (2) where N is the number of dd tasks. We don't know N beforehand, but still can estimate balanced_dirty_ratelimit within 200ms. Start by throttling each dd task at rate task_ratelimit = task_ratelimit_0 (3) (any non-zero initial value is OK) After 200ms, we measured dirty_rate = # of pages dirtied by all dd's / 200ms write_bw = # of pages written to the disk / 200ms For the aggressive dd dirtiers, the equality holds dirty_rate == N * task_rate == N * task_ratelimit_0 (4) Or task_ratelimit_0 == dirty_rate / N (5) Now we conclude that the balanced task ratelimit can be estimated by write_bw balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit_0 * ---------- (6) dirty_rate Because with (4) and (5) we can get the desired equality (1): write_bw balanced_dirty_ratelimit == (dirty_rate / N) * ---------- dirty_rate == write_bw / N Then using the balanced task ratelimit we can compute task pause times like: task_pause = task->nr_dirtied / task_ratelimit task_ratelimit with position control ------------------------------------ However, while the above gives us means of matching the dirty rate to the writeout bandwidth, it at best provides us with a stable dirty page count (assuming a static system). In order to control the dirty page count such that it is high enough to provide performance, but does not exceed the specified limit we need another control. The dirty position control works by extending (2) to task_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit * pos_ratio (7) where pos_ratio is a negative feedback function that subjects to 1) f(setpoint) = 1.0 2) df/dx < 0 That is, if the dirty pages are ABOVE the setpoint, we throttle each task a bit more HEAVY than balanced_dirty_ratelimit, so that the dirty pages are created less fast than they are cleaned, thus DROP to the setpoints (and the reverse). Based on (7) and the assumption that both dirty_ratelimit and pos_ratio remains CONSTANT for the past 200ms, we get task_ratelimit_0 = balanced_dirty_ratelimit * pos_ratio (8) Putting (8) into (6), we get the formula used in bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit(): write_bw balanced_dirty_ratelimit *= pos_ratio * ---------- (9) dirty_rate Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pages

2011-10-03T13:08:56Z

Introduce the BDI_DIRTIED counter. It will be used for estimating the bdi's dirty bandwidth. CC: Jan Kara CC: Michael Rubin CC: Peter Zijlstra Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

atomic: use

2011-07-26T23:49:47Z

This allows us to move duplicated code in (atomic_inc_not_zero() for now) to Signed-off-by: Arun Sharma Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: David Miller Cc: Eric Dumazet Acked-by: Mike Frysinger Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds