user/sven/linux.git/include/trace/events/writeback.h, branch v3.2.40

writeback: fix dereferencing NULL bdi->dev on trace_writeback_queue

2012-02-20T20:46:17Z

commit 977b7e3a52a7421ad33a393a38ece59f3d41c2fa upstream. When a SD card is hot removed without umount, del_gendisk() will call bdi_unregister() without destroying/freeing it. This leaves the bdi in the bdi->dev = NULL, bdi->wb.task = NULL, bdi->bdi_list removed state. When sync(2) gets the bdi before bdi_unregister() and calls bdi_queue_work() after the unregister, trace_writeback_queue will be dereferencing the NULL bdi->dev. Fix it with a simple test for NULL. LKML-reference: http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/18/346 Reported-by: Rabin Vincent Tested-by: Namjae Jeon Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

writeback: fix NULL bdi->dev in trace writeback_single_inode

2012-02-20T20:46:16Z

commit 15eb77a07c714ac80201abd0a9568888bcee6276 upstream. bdi_prune_sb() resets sb->s_bdi to default_backing_dev_info when the tearing down the original bdi. Fix trace_writeback_single_inode to use sb->s_bdi=default_backing_dev_info rather than bdi->dev=NULL for a teared down bdi. Reported-by: Rabin Vincent Tested-by: Rabin Vincent Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

writeback: show writeback reason with __print_symbolic

2011-12-18T06:20:17Z

This makes the binary trace understandable by trace-cmd. CC: Dave Chinner CC: Curt Wohlgemuth CC: Steven Rostedt 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

writeback: send work item to queue_io, move_expired_inodes

2011-10-30T16:33:27Z

Instead of sending ->older_than_this to queue_io() and move_expired_inodes(), send the entire wb_writeback_work structure. There are other fields of a work item that are useful in these routines and in tracepoints. Acked-by: Jan Kara Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pages

2011-10-30T16:29:38Z

Useful for analyzing the dynamics of the throttling algorithms and debugging user reported problems. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimit

2011-10-30T16:29:21Z

It helps understand how various throttle bandwidths are updated. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages()

2011-10-03T13:08:57Z

As proposed by Chris, Dave and Jan, don't start foreground writeback IO inside balance_dirty_pages(). Instead, simply let it idle sleep for some time to throttle the dirtying task. In the mean while, kick off the per-bdi flusher thread to do background writeback IO. RATIONALS ========= - disk seeks on concurrent writeback of multiple inodes (Dave Chinner) If every thread doing writes and being throttled start foreground writeback, it leads to N IO submitters from at least N different inodes at the same time, end up with N different sets of IO being issued with potentially zero locality to each other, resulting in much lower elevator sort/merge efficiency and hence we seek the disk all over the place to service the different sets of IO. OTOH, if there is only one submission thread, it doesn't jump between inodes in the same way when congestion clears - it keeps writing to the same inode, resulting in large related chunks of sequential IOs being issued to the disk. This is more efficient than the above foreground writeback because the elevator works better and the disk seeks less. - lock contention and cache bouncing on concurrent IO submitters (Dave Chinner) With this patchset, the fs_mark benchmark on a 12-drive software RAID0 goes from CPU bound to IO bound, freeing "3-4 CPUs worth of spinlock contention". * "CPU usage has dropped by ~55%", "it certainly appears that most of the CPU time saving comes from the removal of contention on the inode_wb_list_lock" (IMHO at least 10% comes from the reduction of cacheline bouncing, because the new code is able to call much less frequently into balance_dirty_pages() and hence access the global page states) * the user space "App overhead" is reduced by 20%, by avoiding the cacheline pollution by the complex writeback code path * "for a ~5% throughput reduction", "the number of write IOs have dropped by ~25%", and the elapsed time reduced from 41:42.17 to 40:53.23. * On a simple test of 100 dd, it reduces the CPU %system time from 30% to 3%, and improves IO throughput from 38MB/s to 42MB/s. - IO size too small for fast arrays and too large for slow USB sticks The write_chunk used by current balance_dirty_pages() cannot be directly set to some large value (eg. 128MB) for better IO efficiency. Because it could lead to more than 1 second user perceivable stalls. Even the current 4MB write size may be too large for slow USB sticks. The fact that balance_dirty_pages() starts IO on itself couples the IO size to wait time, which makes it hard to do suitable IO size while keeping the wait time under control. Now it's possible to increase writeback chunk size proportional to the disk bandwidth. In a simple test of 50 dd's on XFS, 1-HDD, 3GB ram, the larger writeback size dramatically reduces the seek count to 1/10 (far beyond my expectation) and improves the write throughput by 24%. - long block time in balance_dirty_pages() hurts desktop responsiveness Many of us may have the experience: it often takes a couple of seconds or even long time to stop a heavy writing dd/cp/tar command with Ctrl-C or "kill -9". - IO pipeline broken by bumpy write() progress There are a broad class of "loop {read(buf); write(buf);}" applications whose read() pipeline will be under-utilized or even come to a stop if the write()s have long latencies _or_ don't progress in a constant rate. The current threshold based throttling inherently transfers the large low level IO completion fluctuations to bumpy application write()s, and further deteriorates with increasing number of dirtiers and/or bdi's. For example, when doing 50 dd's + 1 remote rsync to an XFS partition, the rsync progresses very bumpy in legacy kernel, and throughput is improved by 67% by this patchset. (plus the larger write chunk size, it will be 93% speedup). The new rate based throttling can support 1000+ dd's with excellent smoothness, low latency and low overheads. For the above reasons, it's much better to do IO-less and low latency pauses in balance_dirty_pages(). Jan Kara, Dave Chinner and me explored the scheme to let balance_dirty_pages() wait for enough writeback IO completions to safeguard the dirty limit. However it's found to have two problems: - in large NUMA systems, the per-cpu counters may have big accounting errors, leading to big throttle wait time and jitters. - NFS may kill large amount of unstable pages with one single COMMIT. Because NFS server serves COMMIT with expensive fsync() IOs, it is desirable to delay and reduce the number of COMMITs. So it's not likely to optimize away such kind of bursty IO completions, and the resulted large (and tiny) stall times in IO completion based throttling. So here is a pause time oriented approach, which tries to control the pause time in each balance_dirty_pages() invocations, by controlling the number of pages dirtied before calling balance_dirty_pages(), for smooth and efficient dirty throttling: - avoid useless (eg. zero pause time) balance_dirty_pages() calls - avoid too small pause time (less than 4ms, which burns CPU power) - avoid too large pause time (more than 200ms, which hurts responsiveness) - avoid big fluctuations of pause times It can control pause times at will. The default policy (in a followup patch) will be to do ~10ms pauses in 1-dd case, and increase to ~100ms in 1000-dd case. BEHAVIOR CHANGE =============== (1) dirty threshold Users will notice that the applications will get throttled once crossing the global (background + dirty)/2=15% threshold, and then balanced around 17.5%. Before patch, the behavior is to just throttle it at 20% dirtyable memory in 1-dd case. Since the task will be soft throttled earlier than before, it may be perceived by end users as performance "slow down" if his application happens to dirty more than 15% dirtyable memory. (2) smoothness/responsiveness Users will notice a more responsive system during heavy writeback. "killall dd" will take effect instantly. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: show raw dirtied_when in trace writeback_single_inode

2011-08-31T00:48:15Z

Save inode->dirtied_when in the raw trace output for reliable scripting, and to also show in formatted output the relative age in seconds for easy human reading. CC: Jan Kara Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: trace global_dirty_state

2011-07-10T05:09:03Z

Add trace event balance_dirty_state for showing the global dirty page counts and thresholds at each global_dirty_limits() invocation. This will cover the callers throttle_vm_writeout(), over_bground_thresh() and each balance_dirty_pages() loop. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang