user/sven/linux.git/include/linux/writeback.h, branch v3.5-rc2

writeback: Avoid iput() from flusher thread

2012-05-06T05:43:41Z

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 Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu

fs: remove 8 bytes of padding from struct writeback_control on 64 bit builds

2012-04-25T13:58:11Z

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 Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu

writeback: fix typo in the writeback_control comment

2012-03-07T15:08:46Z

Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina

Merge branch 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux

2012-01-11T00:59:59Z

* '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

mm: try to distribute dirty pages fairly across zones

2012-01-11T00:30:43Z

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 Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Acked-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko Tested-by: Wu Fengguang Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Christoph Hellwig Cc: Dave Chinner Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Shaohua Li Cc: Rik van Riel Cc: Chris Mason Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/page-writeback.c: make determine_dirtyable_memory static again

2012-01-11T00:30:41Z

The tracing ring-buffer used this function briefly, but not anymore. Make it local to the writeback code again. Also, move the function so that no forward declaration needs to be reintroduced. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Acked-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko Cc: Wu Fengguang Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: move MIN_WRITEBACK_PAGES to fs-writeback.c

2012-01-08T02:35:19Z

Fix compile error fs/fs-writeback.c:515:33: error: ‘PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT’ undeclared (first use in this function) Reported-by: Randy Dunlap Acked-by: Randy Dunlap Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirty

2011-12-18T06:20:23Z

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 Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasks

2011-12-18T06:20:20Z

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 Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

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