user/sven/linux.git/include/linux/writeback.h, branch v4.9.80

mm, vmscan: get rid of throttle_vm_writeout

2016-10-08T01:46:27Z

throttle_vm_writeout() was introduced back in 2005 to fix OOMs caused by excessive pageout activity during the reclaim. Too many pages could be put under writeback therefore LRUs would be full of unreclaimable pages until the IO completes and in turn the OOM killer could be invoked. There have been some important changes introduced since then in the reclaim path though. Writers are throttled by balance_dirty_pages when initiating the buffered IO and later during the memory pressure, the direct reclaim is throttled by wait_iff_congested if the node is considered congested by dirty pages on LRUs and the underlying bdi is congested by the queued IO. The kswapd is throttled as well if it encounters pages marked for immediate reclaim or under writeback which signals that that there are too many pages under writeback already. Finally should_reclaim_retry does congestion_wait if the reclaim cannot make any progress and there are too many dirty/writeback pages. Another important aspect is that we do not issue any IO from the direct reclaim context anymore. In a heavy parallel load this could queue a lot of IO which would be very scattered and thus unefficient which would just make the problem worse. This three mechanisms should throttle and keep the amount of IO in a steady state even under heavy IO and memory pressure so yet another throttling point doesn't really seem helpful. Quite contrary, Mikulas Patocka has reported that swap backed by dm-crypt doesn't work properly because the swapout IO cannot make sufficient progress as the writeout path depends on dm_crypt worker which has to allocate memory to perform the encryption. In order to guarantee a forward progress it relies on the mempool allocator. mempool_alloc(), however, prefers to use the underlying (usually page) allocator before it grabs objects from the pool. Such an allocation can dive into the memory reclaim and consequently to throttle_vm_writeout. If there are too many dirty or pages under writeback it will get throttled even though it is in fact a flusher to clear pending pages. kworker/u4:0 D ffff88003df7f438 10488 6 2 0x00000000 Workqueue: kcryptd kcryptd_crypt [dm_crypt] Call Trace: schedule+0x3c/0x90 schedule_timeout+0x1d8/0x360 io_schedule_timeout+0xa4/0x110 congestion_wait+0x86/0x1f0 throttle_vm_writeout+0x44/0xd0 shrink_zone_memcg+0x613/0x720 shrink_zone+0xe0/0x300 do_try_to_free_pages+0x1ad/0x450 try_to_free_pages+0xef/0x300 __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x879/0x1210 alloc_pages_current+0xa1/0x1f0 new_slab+0x2d7/0x6a0 ___slab_alloc+0x3fb/0x5c0 __slab_alloc+0x51/0x90 kmem_cache_alloc+0x27b/0x310 mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30 mempool_alloc+0x91/0x230 bio_alloc_bioset+0xbd/0x260 kcryptd_crypt+0x114/0x3b0 [dm_crypt] Let's just drop throttle_vm_writeout altogether. It is not very much helpful anymore. I have tried to test a potential writeback IO runaway similar to the one described in the original patch which has introduced that [1]. Small virtual machine (512MB RAM, 4 CPUs, 2G of swap space and disk image on a rather slow NFS in a sync mode on the host) with 8 parallel writers each writing 1G worth of data. As soon as the pagecache fills up and the direct reclaim hits then I start anon memory consumer in a loop (allocating 300M and exiting after populating it) in the background to make the memory pressure even stronger as well as to disrupt the steady state for the IO. The direct reclaim is throttled because of the congestion as well as kswapd hitting congestion_wait due to nr_immediate but throttle_vm_writeout doesn't ever trigger the sleep throughout the test. Dirty+writeback are close to nr_dirty_threshold with some fluctuations caused by the anon consumer. [1] https://www2.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.9-rc1/2.6.9-rc1-mm3/broken-out/vm-pageout-throttling.patch Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1471171473-21418-1-git-send-email-mhocko@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka Cc: Marcelo Tosatti Cc: NeilBrown Cc: Ondrej Kozina Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, page_alloc: consider dirtyable memory in terms of nodes

2016-07-28T23:07:41Z

Historically dirty pages were spread among zones but now that LRUs are per-node it is more appropriate to consider dirty pages in a node. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1467970510-21195-17-git-send-email-mgorman@techsingularity.net Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka Acked-by: Michal Hocko Cc: Hillf Danton Cc: Joonsoo Kim Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: Rik van Riel Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

fs/fs-writeback.c: add a new writeback list for sync

2016-07-26T23:19:19Z

wait_sb_inodes() currently does a walk of all inodes in the filesystem to find dirty one to wait on during sync. This is highly inefficient and wastes a lot of CPU when there are lots of clean cached inodes that we don't need to wait on. To avoid this "all inode" walk, we need to track inodes that are currently under writeback that we need to wait for. We do this by adding inodes to a writeback list on the sb when the mapping is first tagged as having pages under writeback. wait_sb_inodes() can then walk this list of "inodes under IO" and wait specifically just for the inodes that the current sync(2) needs to wait for. Define a couple helpers to add/remove an inode from the writeback list and call them when the overall mapping is tagged for or cleared from writeback. Update wait_sb_inodes() to walk only the inodes under writeback due to the sync. With this change, filesystem sync times are significantly reduced for fs' with largely populated inode caches and otherwise no other work to do. For example, on a 16xcpu 2GHz x86-64 server, 10TB XFS filesystem with a ~10m entry inode cache, sync times are reduced from ~7.3s to less than 0.1s when the filesystem is fully clean. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1466594593-6757-2-git-send-email-bfoster@redhat.com Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik Signed-off-by: Brian Foster Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Tested-by: Holger Hoffstätte Cc: Al Viro Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: flush inode cgroup wb switches instead of pinning super_block

2016-03-03T21:42:50Z

If cgroup writeback is in use, inodes can be scheduled for asynchronous wb switching. Before 5ff8eaac1636 ("writeback: keep superblock pinned during cgroup writeback association switches"), this could race with umount leading to super_block being destroyed while inodes are pinned for wb switching. 5ff8eaac1636 fixed it by bumping s_active while wb switches are in flight; however, this allowed in-flight wb switches to make umounts asynchronous when the userland expected synchronosity - e.g. fsck immediately following umount may fail because the device is still busy. This patch removes the problematic super_block pinning and instead makes generic_shutdown_super() flush in-flight wb switches. wb switches are now executed on a dedicated isw_wq so that they can be flushed and isw_nr_in_flight keeps track of the number of in-flight wb switches so that flushing can be avoided in most cases. v2: Move cgroup_writeback_umount() further below and add MS_ACTIVE check in inode_switch_wbs() as Jan an Al suggested. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Reported-by: Tahsin Erdogan Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Al Viro Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/g/CAAeU0aNCq7LGODvVGRU-oU_o-6enii5ey0p1c26D1ZzYwkDc5A@mail.gmail.com Fixes: 5ff8eaac1636 ("writeback: keep superblock pinned during cgroup writeback association switches") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org #v4.5 Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Tested-by: Tahsin Erdogan Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: implement foreign cgroup inode detection

2015-06-02T14:40:20Z

As concurrent write sharing of an inode is expected to be very rare and memcg only tracks page ownership on first-use basis severely confining the usefulness of such sharing, cgroup writeback tracks ownership per-inode. While the support for concurrent write sharing of an inode is deemed unnecessary, an inode being written to by different cgroups at different points in time is a lot more common, and, more importantly, charging only by first-use can too readily lead to grossly incorrect behaviors (single foreign page can lead to gigabytes of writeback to be incorrectly attributed). To resolve this issue, cgroup writeback detects the majority dirtier of an inode and will transfer the ownership to it. To avoid unnnecessary oscillation, the detection mechanism keeps track of history and gives out the switch verdict only if the foreign usage pattern is stable over a certain amount of time and/or writeback attempts. The detection mechanism has fairly low space and computation overhead. It adds 8 bytes to struct inode (one int and two u16's) and minimal amount of calculation per IO. The detection mechanism converges to the correct answer usually in several seconds of IO time when there's a clear majority dirtier. Even when there isn't, it can reach an acceptable answer fairly quickly under most circumstances. Please see wb_detach_inode() for more details. This patch only implements detection. Following patches will implement actual switching. v2: wbc_account_io() now checks whether the wbc is associated with a wb before dereferencing it. This can happen when pageout() is writing pages directly without going through the usual writeback path. As pageout() path is single-threaded, we don't want it to be blocked behind a slow cgroup and ultimately want it to delegate actual writing to the usual writeback path. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Greg Thelen Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: make writeback_control track the inode being written back

2015-06-02T14:39:48Z

Currently, for cgroup writeback, the IO submission paths directly associate the bio's with the blkcg from inode_to_wb_blkcg_css(); however, it'd be necessary to keep more writeback context to implement foreign inode writeback detection. wbc (writeback_control) is the natural fit for the extra context - it persists throughout the writeback of each inode and is passed all the way down to IO submission paths. This patch adds wbc_attach_and_unlock_inode(), wbc_detach_inode(), and wbc_attach_fdatawrite_inode() which are used to associate wbc with the inode being written back. IO submission paths now use wbc_init_bio() instead of directly associating bio's with blkcg themselves. This leaves inode_to_wb_blkcg_css() w/o any user. The function is removed. wbc currently only tracks the associated wb (bdi_writeback). Future patches will add more for foreign inode detection. The association is established under i_lock which will be depended upon when migrating foreign inodes to other wb's. As currently, once established, inode to wb association never changes, going through wbc when initializing bio's doesn't cause any behavior changes. v2: submit_blk_blkcg() now checks whether the wbc is associated with a wb before dereferencing it. This can happen when pageout() is writing pages directly without going through the usual writeback path. As pageout() path is single-threaded, we don't want it to be blocked behind a slow cgroup and ultimately want it to delegate actual writing to the usual writeback path. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Greg Thelen Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: relocate wb[_try]_get(), wb_put(), inode_{attach|detach}_wb()

2015-06-02T14:39:08Z

Currently, majority of cgroup writeback support including all the above functions are implemented in include/linux/backing-dev.h and mm/backing-dev.c; however, the portion closely related to writeback logic implemented in include/linux/writeback.h and mm/page-writeback.c will expand to support foreign writeback detection and correction. This patch moves wb[_try]_get() and wb_put() to include/linux/backing-dev-defs.h so that they can be used from writeback.h and inode_{attach|detach}_wb() to writeback.h and page-writeback.c. This is pure reorganization and doesn't introduce any functional changes. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Greg Thelen Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: reset wb_domain->dirty_limit[_tstmp] when memcg domain size changes

2015-06-02T14:38:13Z

The amount of available memory to a memcg wb_domain can change as memcg configuration changes. A domain's ->dirty_limit exists to smooth out sudden drops in dirty threshold; however, when a domain's size actually drops significantly, it hinders the dirty throttling from adjusting to the new configuration leading to unexpected behaviors including unnecessary OOM kills. This patch resolves the issue by adding wb_domain_size_changed() which resets ->dirty_limit[_tstmp] and making memcg call it on configuration changes. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Greg Thelen Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: implement memcg wb_domain

2015-06-02T14:38:13Z

Dirtyable memory is distributed to a wb (bdi_writeback) according to the relative bandwidth the wb is writing out in the whole system. This distribution is global - each wb is measured against all other wb's and gets the proportinately sized portion of the memory in the whole system. For cgroup writeback, the amount of dirtyable memory is scoped by memcg and thus each wb would need to be measured and controlled in its memcg. IOW, a wb will belong to two writeback domains - the global and memcg domains. The previous patches laid the groundwork to support the two wb_domains and this patch implements memcg wb_domain. memcg->cgwb_domain is initialized on css online and destroyed on css release, wb->memcg_completions is added, and __wb_writeout_inc() is updated to increment completions against both global and memcg wb_domains. The following patches will update balance_dirty_pages() and its subroutines to actually consider memcg wb_domain for throttling. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Greg Thelen Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: move over_bground_thresh() to mm/page-writeback.c

2015-06-02T14:38:13Z

and rename it to wb_over_bg_thresh(). The function is closely tied to the dirty throttling mechanism implemented in page-writeback.c. This relocation will allow future updates necessary for cgroup writeback support. While at it, add function comment. This is pure reorganization and doesn't introduce any behavioral changes. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Cc: Jens Axboe Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Greg Thelen Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe