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2012-05-06writeback: initialize global_dirty_limitFengguang Wu
This prevents global_dirty_limit from remaining 0 (the initial value) for long time, since it's only updated in update_dirty_limit() when above the dirty freerun area. It will avoid unexpected consequences when some random code use it as a convenient approximation of the global dirty threshold. Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-04-14mm: page-writeback.c: local functions should not be exposed globallyH Hartley Sweeten
The function global_dirtyable_memory is only referenced in this file and should be marked static to prevent it from being exposed globally. This quiets the sparse warning: warning: symbol 'global_dirtyable_memory' was not declared. Should it be static? Signed-off-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com> Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-03-28Merge tag 'ext4_for_linus' of ↵Linus Torvalds
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4 Pull ext4 updates for 3.4 from Ted Ts'o: "Ext4 commits for 3.3 merge window; mostly cleanups and bug fixes The changes to export dirty_writeback_interval are from Artem's s_dirt cleanup patch series. The same is true of the change to remove the s_dirt helper functions which never got used by anyone in-tree. I've run these changes by Al Viro, and am carrying them so that Artem can more easily fix up the rest of the file systems during the next merge window. (Originally we had hopped to remove the use of s_dirt from ext4 during this merge window, but his patches had some bugs, so I ultimately ended dropping them from the ext4 tree.)" * tag 'ext4_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4: (66 commits) vfs: remove unused superblock helpers mm: export dirty_writeback_interval ext4: remove useless s_dirt assignment ext4: write superblock only once on unmount ext4: do not mark superblock as dirty unnecessarily ext4: correct ext4_punch_hole return codes ext4: remove restrictive checks for EOFBLOCKS_FL ext4: always set then trimmed blocks count into len ext4: fix trimmed block count accunting ext4: fix start and len arguments handling in ext4_trim_fs() ext4: update s_free_{inodes,blocks}_count during online resize ext4: change some printk() calls to use ext4_msg() instead ext4: avoid output message interleaving in ext4_error_<foo>() ext4: remove trailing newlines from ext4_msg() and ext4_error() messages ext4: add no_printk argument validation, fix fallout ext4: remove redundant "EXT4-fs: " from uses of ext4_msg ext4: give more helpful error message in ext4_ext_rm_leaf() ext4: remove unused code from ext4_ext_map_blocks() ext4: rewrite punch hole to use ext4_ext_remove_space() jbd2: cleanup journal tail after transaction commit ...
2012-03-21mm: export dirty_writeback_intervalArtem Bityutskiy
Export 'dirty_writeback_interval' to make it visible to file-systems. We are going to push superblock management down to file-systems and get rid of the 'sync_supers' kernel thread completly. Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com> Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
2012-03-21mm: use global_dirty_limit in throttle_vm_writeout()Fengguang Wu
When starting a memory hog task, a desktop box w/o swap is found to go unresponsive for a long time. It's solely caused by lots of congestion waits in throttle_vm_writeout(): gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073384: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1 gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073386: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000 gtali-4237 553.080377: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1 gtali-4237 553.080378: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000 Xorg-3483 553.103375: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1 Xorg-3483 553.103377: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000 The root cause is, the dirty threshold is knocked down a lot by the memory hog task. Fixed by using global_dirty_limit which decreases gradually on such events and can guarantee we stay above (the also decreasing) nr_dirty in the progress of following down to the new dirty threshold. Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com> Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10Merge branch 'writeback-for-linus' of ↵Linus Torvalds
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux * '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
2012-01-10mm: try to distribute dirty pages fairly across zonesJohannes Weiner
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 <jweiner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Tested-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10mm: writeback: cleanups in preparation for per-zone dirty limitsJohannes Weiner
The next patch will introduce per-zone dirty limiting functions in addition to the traditional global dirty limiting. Rename determine_dirtyable_memory() to global_dirtyable_memory() before adding the zone-specific version, and fix up its documentation. Also, move the functions to determine the dirtyable memory and the function to calculate the dirty limit based on that together so that their relationship is more apparent and that they can be commented on as a group. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10mm: exclude reserved pages from dirtyable memoryJohannes Weiner
Per-zone dirty limits try to distribute page cache pages allocated for writing across zones in proportion to the individual zone sizes, to reduce the likelihood of reclaim having to write back individual pages from the LRU lists in order to make progress. This patch: The amount of dirtyable pages should not include the full number of free pages: there is a number of reserved pages that the page allocator and kswapd always try to keep free. The closer (reclaimable pages - dirty pages) is to the number of reserved pages, the more likely it becomes for reclaim to run into dirty pages: +----------+ --- | anon | | +----------+ | | | | | | -- dirty limit new -- flusher new | file | | | | | | | | | -- dirty limit old -- flusher old | | | +----------+ --- reclaim | reserved | +----------+ | kernel | +----------+ This patch introduces a per-zone dirty reserve that takes both the lowmem reserve as well as the high watermark of the zone into account, and a global sum of those per-zone values that is subtracted from the global amount of dirtyable pages. The lowmem reserve is unavailable to page cache allocations and kswapd tries to keep the high watermark free. We don't want to end up in a situation where reclaim has to clean pages in order to balance zones. Not treating reserved pages as dirtyable on a global level is only a conceptual fix. In reality, dirty pages are not distributed equally across zones and reclaim runs into dirty pages on a regular basis. But it is important to get this right before tackling the problem on a per-zone level, where the distance between reclaim and the dirty pages is mostly much smaller in absolute numbers. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix highmem build] Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10mm/page-writeback.c: make determine_dirtyable_memory static againJohannes Weiner
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 <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-03fs: move code out of buffer.cAl Viro
Move invalidate_bdev, block_sync_page into fs/block_dev.c. Export kill_bdev as well, so brd doesn't have to open code it. Reduce buffer_head.h requirement accordingly. Removed a rather large comment from invalidate_bdev, as it looked a bit obsolete to bother moving. The small comment replacing it says enough. Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2011-12-18writeback: balanced_rate cannot exceed write bandwidthWu Fengguang
Add an upper limit to balanced_rate according to the below inequality. This filters out some rare but huge singular points, which at least enables more readable gnuplot figures. When there are N dd dirtiers, balanced_dirty_ratelimit = write_bw / N So it holds that balanced_dirty_ratelimit <= write_bw The singular points originate from dirty_rate in the below formular: balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit * write_bw / dirty_rate where dirty_rate = (number of page dirties in the past 200ms) / 200ms In the extreme case, if all dd tasks suddenly get blocked on something else and hence no pages are dirtied at all, dirty_rate will be 0 and balanced_dirty_ratelimit will be inf. This could happen in reality. Note that these huge singular points are not a real threat, since they are _guaranteed_ to be filtered out by the min(balanced_dirty_ratelimit, task_ratelimit) line in bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit(). task_ratelimit is based on the number of dirty pages, which will never _suddenly_ fly away like balanced_dirty_ratelimit. So any weirdly large balanced_dirty_ratelimit will be cut down to the level of task_ratelimit. There won't be tiny singular points though, as long as the dirty pages lie inside the dirty throttling region (above the freerun region). Because there the dd tasks will be throttled by balanced_dirty_pages() and won't be able to suddenly dirty much more pages than average. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18writeback: do strict bdi dirty_exceededWu Fengguang
This helps to reduce dirty throttling polls and hence CPU overheads. bdi->dirty_exceeded typically only helps when suddenly starting 100+ dd's on a disk, in which case the dd's may need to poll balance_dirty_pages() earlier than tsk->nr_dirtied_pause. CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18writeback: avoid tiny dirty poll intervalsWu Fengguang
The LKP tests see big 56% regression for the case fio_mmap_randwrite_64k. Shaohua manages to root cause it to be the much smaller dirty pause times and hence much more frequent invocations to the IO-less balance_dirty_pages(). Since fio_mmap_randwrite_64k effectively contains both reads and writes, the more frequent pauses triggered more idling in the cfq IO scheduler. The solution is to increase pause time all the way up to the max 200ms in this case, which is found to restore most performance. This will help reduce CPU overheads in other cases, too. Note that I don't expect many performance critical workloads to run this access pattern: the mmap read-on-write is rather inefficient and could be avoided by doing normal writes syscalls. CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Reported-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com> Tested-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18writeback: max, min and target dirty pause timeWu Fengguang
Control the pause time and the call intervals to balance_dirty_pages() with three parameters: 1) max_pause, limited by bdi_dirty and MAX_PAUSE 2) the target pause time, grows with the number of dd tasks and is normally limited by max_pause/2 3) the minimal pause, set to half the target pause and is used to skip short sleeps and accumulate them into bigger ones The typical behaviors after patch: - if ever task_ratelimit is far below dirty_ratelimit, the pause time will remain constant at max_pause and nr_dirtied_pause will be fluctuating with task_ratelimit - in the normal cases, nr_dirtied_pause will remain stable (keep in the same pace with dirty_ratelimit) and the pause time will be fluctuating with task_ratelimit In summary, someone has to fluctuate with task_ratelimit, because task_ratelimit = nr_dirtied_pause / pause We normally prefer a stable nr_dirtied_pause, until reaching max_pause. The notable behavior changes are: - in stable workloads, there will no longer be sudden big trajectory switching of nr_dirtied_pause as concerned by Peter. It will be as smooth as dirty_ratelimit and changing proportionally with it (as always, assuming bdi bandwidth does not fluctuate across 2^N lines, otherwise nr_dirtied_pause will show up in 2+ parallel trajectories) - in the rare cases when something keeps task_ratelimit far below dirty_ratelimit, the smoothness can no longer be retained and nr_dirtied_pause will be "dancing" with task_ratelimit. This fixes a (not that destructive but still not good) bug that dirty_ratelimit gets brought down undesirably <= balanced_dirty_ratelimit is under estimated <= weakly executed task_ratelimit <= pause goes too large and gets trimmed down to max_pause <= nr_dirtied_pause (based on dirty_ratelimit) is set too large <= dirty_ratelimit being much larger than task_ratelimit - introduce min_pause to avoid small pause sleeps - when pause is trimmed down to max_pause, try to compensate it at the next pause time The "refactor" type of changes are: The max_pause equation is slightly transformed to make it slightly more efficient. We now scale target_pause by (N * 10ms) on 2^N concurrent tasks, which is effectively equal to the original scaling max_pause by (N * 20ms) because the original code does implicit target_pause ~= max_pause / 2. Based on the same implicit ratio, target_pause starts with 10ms on 1 dd. CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18writeback: dirty ratelimit - think time compensationWu Fengguang
Compensate the task's think time when computing the final pause time, so that ->dirty_ratelimit can be executed accurately. think time := time spend outside of balance_dirty_pages() In the rare case that the task slept longer than the 200ms period time (result in negative pause time), the sleep time will be compensated in the following periods, too, if it's less than 1 second. Accumulated errors are carefully avoided as long as the max pause area is not hitted. Pseudo code: period = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit; think = jiffies - dirty_paused_when; pause = period - think; 1) normal case: period > think pause = period - think dirty_paused_when = jiffies + pause nr_dirtied = 0 period time |===============================>| think time pause time |===============>|==============>| ------|----------------|---------------|------------------------ dirty_paused_when jiffies 2) no pause case: period <= think don't pause; reduce future pause time by: dirty_paused_when += period nr_dirtied = 0 period time |===============================>| think time |===================================================>| ------|--------------------------------+-------------------|---- dirty_paused_when jiffies Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirtyWu Fengguang
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 <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writesWu Fengguang
When dd in 512bytes, generic_perform_write() calls balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() 8 times for the same page, but obviously the page is only dirtied once. Fix it by accounting tsk->nr_dirtied and bdp_ratelimits at page dirty time. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasksWu Fengguang
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 <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-08writeback: set max_pause to lowest value on zero bdi_dirtyWu Fengguang
Some trace shows lots of bdi_dirty=0 lines where it's actually some small value if w/o the accounting errors in the per-cpu bdi stats. In this case the max pause time should really be set to the smallest (non-zero) value to avoid IO queue underrun and improve throughput. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-08writeback: permit through good bdi even when global dirty exceededWu Fengguang
On a system with 1 local mount and 1 NFS mount, if the NFS server becomes not responding when dd to the NFS mount, the NFS dirty pages may exceed the global dirty limit and _every_ task involving writing will be blocked. The whole system appears unresponsive. The workaround is to permit through the bdi's that only has a small number of dirty pages. The number chosen (bdi_stat_error pages) is not enough to enable the local disk to run in optimal throughput, however is enough to make the system responsive on a broken NFS mount. The user can then kill the dirtiers on the NFS mount and increase the global dirty limit to bring up the local disk's throughput. It risks allowing dirty pages to grow much larger than the global dirty limit when there are 1000+ mounts, however that's very unlikely to happen, especially in low memory profiles. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-08writeback: comment on the bdi dirty thresholdWu Fengguang
We do "floating proportions" to let active devices to grow its target share of dirty pages and stalled/inactive devices to decrease its target share over time. It works well except in the case of "an inactive disk suddenly goes busy", where the initial target share may be too small. To mitigate this, bdi_position_ratio() has the below line to raise a small bdi_thresh when it's safe to do so, so that the disk be feed with enough dirty pages for efficient IO and in turn fast rampup of bdi_thresh: bdi_thresh = max(bdi_thresh, (limit - dirty) / 8); balance_dirty_pages() normally does negative feedback control which adjusts ratelimit to balance the bdi dirty pages around the target. In some extreme cases when that is not enough, it will have to block the tasks completely until the bdi dirty pages drop below bdi_thresh. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-17writeback: remove vm_dirties and task->dirtiesWu Fengguang
They are not used any more. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-17writeback: hard throttle 1000+ dd on a slow USB stickWu Fengguang
The sleep based balance_dirty_pages() can pause at most MAX_PAUSE=200ms on every 1 4KB-page, which means it cannot throttle a task under 4KB/200ms=20KB/s. So when there are more than 512 dd writing to a 10MB/s USB stick, its bdi dirty pages could grow out of control. Even if we can increase MAX_PAUSE, the minimal (task_ratelimit = 1) means a limit of 4KB/s. They can eventually be safeguarded by the global limit check (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh). However if someone is also writing to an HDD at the same time, it'll get poor HDD write performance. We at least want to maintain good write performance for other devices when one device is attacked by some "massive parallel" workload, or suffers from slow write bandwidth, or somehow get stalled due to some error condition (eg. NFS server not responding). For a stalled device, we need to completely block its dirtiers, too, before its bdi dirty pages grow all the way up to the global limit and leave no space for the other functional devices. So change the loop exit condition to /* * Always enforce global dirty limit; also enforce bdi dirty limit * if the normal max_pause sleeps cannot keep things under control. */ if (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh && (bdi_dirty < bdi_thresh || bdi->dirty_ratelimit > 1)) break; which can be further simplified to if (task_ratelimit) break; Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-16mm: Make task in balance_dirty_pages() killableJan Kara
There is no reason why task in balance_dirty_pages() shouldn't be killable and it helps in recovering from some error conditions (like when filesystem goes in error state and cannot accept writeback anymore but we still want to kill processes using it to be able to unmount it). There will be follow up patches to further abort the generic_perform_write() and other filesystem write loops, to avoid large write + SIGKILL combination exceeding the dirty limit and possibly strange OOM. Reported-by: Kazuya Mio <k-mio@sx.jp.nec.com> Tested-by: Kazuya Mio <k-mio@sx.jp.nec.com> Reviewed-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-07writeback: fix uninitialized task_ratelimitWu Fengguang
In balance_dirty_pages() task_ratelimit may be not initialized (initialization skiped by goto pause), and then used when calling tracing hook. Fix it by moving the task_ratelimit assignment before goto pause. Reported-by: Witold Baryluk <baryluk@smp.if.uj.edu.pl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-06Merge branch 'modsplit-Oct31_2011' of ↵Linus Torvalds
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulg/linux * 'modsplit-Oct31_2011' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulg/linux: (230 commits) Revert "tracing: Include module.h in define_trace.h" irq: don't put module.h into irq.h for tracking irqgen modules. bluetooth: macroize two small inlines to avoid module.h ip_vs.h: fix implicit use of module_get/module_put from module.h nf_conntrack.h: fix up fallout from implicit moduleparam.h presence include: replace linux/module.h with "struct module" wherever possible include: convert various register fcns to macros to avoid include chaining crypto.h: remove unused crypto_tfm_alg_modname() inline uwb.h: fix implicit use of asm/page.h for PAGE_SIZE pm_runtime.h: explicitly requires notifier.h linux/dmaengine.h: fix implicit use of bitmap.h and asm/page.h miscdevice.h: fix up implicit use of lists and types stop_machine.h: fix implicit use of smp.h for smp_processor_id of: fix implicit use of errno.h in include/linux/of.h of_platform.h: delete needless include <linux/module.h> acpi: remove module.h include from platform/aclinux.h miscdevice.h: delete unnecessary inclusion of module.h device_cgroup.h: delete needless include <linux/module.h> net: sch_generic remove redundant use of <linux/module.h> net: inet_timewait_sock doesnt need <linux/module.h> ... Fix up trivial conflicts (other header files, and removal of the ab3550 mfd driver) in - drivers/media/dvb/frontends/dibx000_common.c - drivers/media/video/{mt9m111.c,ov6650.c} - drivers/mfd/ab3550-core.c - include/linux/dmaengine.h
2011-11-06Merge branch 'writeback-for-linus' of ↵Linus Torvalds
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux * 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux: writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_work writeback: send work item to queue_io, move_expired_inodes writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pages writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimit writeback: fix ppc compile warnings on do_div(long long, unsigned long) writeback: per-bdi background threshold writeback: dirty position control - bdi reserve area writeback: control dirty pause time writeback: limit max dirty pause time writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages() writeback: per task dirty rate limit writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimit writeback: dirty rate control writeback: add bg_threshold parameter to __bdi_update_bandwidth() writeback: dirty position control writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pages
2011-10-31mm/page-writeback.c: document bdi_min_ratioJohannes Weiner
Looks like someone got distracted after adding the comment characters. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-10-31mm: Map most files to use export.h instead of module.hPaul Gortmaker
The files changed within are only using the EXPORT_SYMBOL macro variants. They are not using core modular infrastructure and hence don't need module.h but only the export.h header. Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
2011-10-31writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_workCurt Wohlgemuth
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 <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pagesWu Fengguang
Useful for analyzing the dynamics of the throttling algorithms and debugging user reported problems. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimitWu Fengguang
It helps understand how various throttle bandwidths are updated. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-11writeback: fix ppc compile warnings on do_div(long long, unsigned long)Wu Fengguang
Fix powerpc compile warnings mm/page-writeback.c: In function 'bdi_position_ratio': mm/page-writeback.c:622:3: warning: comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast [enabled by default] page-writeback.c:635:4: warning: comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast [enabled by default] Also fix gcc "uninitialized var" warnings. Reported-by: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: dirty position control - bdi reserve areaWu Fengguang
Keep a minimal pool of dirty pages for each bdi, so that the disk IO queues won't underrun. Also gently increase a small bdi_thresh to avoid it stuck in 0 for some light dirtied bdi. It's particularly useful for JBOD and small memory system. It may result in (pos_ratio > 1) at the setpoint and push the dirty pages high. This is more or less intended because the bdi is in the danger of IO queue underflow. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: control dirty pause timeWu Fengguang
The dirty pause time shall ultimately be controlled by adjusting nr_dirtied_pause, since there is relationship pause = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit Assuming pages_dirtied ~= nr_dirtied_pause task_ratelimit ~= dirty_ratelimit We get nr_dirtied_pause ~= dirty_ratelimit * desired_pause Here dirty_ratelimit is preferred over task_ratelimit because it's more stable. It's also important to limit possible large transitional errors: - bw is changing quickly - pages_dirtied << nr_dirtied_pause on entering dirty exceeded area - pages_dirtied >> nr_dirtied_pause on btrfs (to be improved by a separate fix, but still expect non-trivial errors) So we end up using the above formula inside clamp_val(). The best test case for this code is to run 100 "dd bs=4M" tasks on btrfs and check its pause time distribution. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: limit max dirty pause timeWu Fengguang
Apply two policies to scale down the max pause time for 1) small number of concurrent dirtiers 2) small memory system (comparing to storage bandwidth) MAX_PAUSE=200ms may only be suitable for high end servers with lots of concurrent dirtiers, where the large pause time can reduce much overheads. Otherwise, smaller pause time is desirable whenever possible, so as to get good responsiveness and smooth user experiences. It's actually required for good disk utilization in the case when all the dirty pages can be synced to disk within MAX_PAUSE=200ms. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages()Wu Fengguang
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 <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: per task dirty rate limitWu Fengguang
Add two fields to task_struct. 1) account dirtied pages in the individual tasks, for accuracy 2) per-task balance_dirty_pages() call intervals, for flexibility The balance_dirty_pages() call interval (ie. nr_dirtied_pause) will scale near-sqrt to the safety gap between dirty pages and threshold. The main problem of per-task nr_dirtied is, if 1k+ tasks start dirtying pages at exactly the same time, each task will be assigned a large initial nr_dirtied_pause, so that the dirty threshold will be exceeded long before each task reached its nr_dirtied_pause and hence call balance_dirty_pages(). The solution is to watch for the number of pages dirtied on each CPU in between the calls into balance_dirty_pages(). If it exceeds ratelimit_pages (3% dirty threshold), force call balance_dirty_pages() for a chance to set bdi->dirty_exceeded. In normal situations, this safeguarding condition is not expected to trigger at all. On the sqrt in dirty_poll_interval(): It will serve as an initial guess when dirty pages are still in the freerun area. When dirty pages are floating inside the dirty control scope [freerun, limit], a followup patch will use some refined dirty poll interval to get the desired pause time. thresh-dirty (MB) sqrt 1 16 2 22 4 32 8 45 16 64 32 90 64 128 128 181 256 256 512 362 1024 512 The above table means, given 1MB (or 1GB) gap and the dd tasks polling balance_dirty_pages() on every 16 (or 512) pages, the dirty limit won't be exceeded as long as there are less than 16 (or 512) concurrent dd's. So sqrt naturally leads to less overheads and more safe concurrent tasks for large memory servers, which have large (thresh-freerun) gaps. peter: keep the per-CPU ratelimit for safeguarding the 1k+ tasks case CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Reviewed-by: Andrea Righi <andrea@betterlinux.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimitWu Fengguang
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 <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: dirty rate controlWu Fengguang
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 <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: add bg_threshold parameter to __bdi_update_bandwidth()Wu Fengguang
No behavior change. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: dirty position controlWu Fengguang
bdi_position_ratio() provides a scale factor to bdi->dirty_ratelimit, so that the resulted task rate limit can drive the dirty pages back to the global/bdi setpoints. Old scheme is, | free run area | throttle area ----------------------------------------+----------------------------> thresh^ dirty pages New scheme is, ^ task rate limit | | * | * | * |[free run] * [smooth throttled] | * | * | * ..bdi->dirty_ratelimit..........* | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * +-------------------------------.-----------------------*------------> setpoint^ limit^ dirty pages The slope of the bdi control line should be 1) large enough to pull the dirty pages to setpoint reasonably fast 2) small enough to avoid big fluctuations in the resulted pos_ratio and hence task ratelimit Since the fluctuation range of the bdi dirty pages is typically observed to be within 1-second worth of data, the bdi control line's slope is selected to be a linear function of bdi write bandwidth, so that it can adapt to slow/fast storage devices well. Assume the bdi control line pos_ratio = 1.0 + k * (dirty - bdi_setpoint) where k is the negative slope. If targeting for 12.5% fluctuation range in pos_ratio when dirty pages are fluctuating in range [bdi_setpoint - write_bw/2, bdi_setpoint + write_bw/2], we get slope k = - 1 / (8 * write_bw) Let pos_ratio(x_intercept) = 0, we get the parameter used in code: x_intercept = bdi_setpoint + 8 * write_bw The global/bdi slopes are nicely complementing each other when the system has only one major bdi (indicated by bdi_thresh ~= thresh): 1) slope of global control line => scaling to the control scope size 2) slope of main bdi control line => scaling to the writeout bandwidth so that - in memory tight systems, (1) becomes strong enough to squeeze dirty pages inside the control scope - in large memory systems where the "gravity" of (1) for pulling the dirty pages to setpoint is too weak, (2) can back (1) up and drive dirty pages to bdi_setpoint ~= setpoint reasonably fast. Unfortunately in JBOD setups, the fluctuation range of bdi threshold is related to memory size due to the interferences between disks. In this case, the bdi slope will be weighted sum of write_bw and bdi_thresh. Given equations span = x_intercept - bdi_setpoint k = df/dx = - 1 / span and the extremum values span = bdi_thresh dx = bdi_thresh we get df = - dx / span = - 1.0 That means, when bdi_dirty deviates bdi_thresh up, pos_ratio and hence task ratelimit will fluctuate by -100%. peter: use 3rd order polynomial for the global control line CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pagesWu Fengguang
Introduce the BDI_DIRTIED counter. It will be used for estimating the bdi's dirty bandwidth. CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> CC: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com> CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-08-19squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good areaWu Fengguang
Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609ab10 ("writeback: introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits") and make the max-pause area smaller and safe. This fixes ~30% performance regression in the ext3 data=writeback fio_mmap_randwrite_64k/fio_mmap_randrw_64k test cases, where there are 12 JBOD disks, on each disk runs 8 concurrent tasks doing reads+writes. Using deadline scheduler also has a regression, but not that big as CFQ, so this suggests we have some write starvation. The test logs show that - the disks are sometimes under utilized - global dirty pages sometimes rush high to the pass-good area for several hundred seconds, while in the mean time some bdi dirty pages drop to very low value (bdi_dirty << bdi_thresh). Then suddenly the global dirty pages dropped under global dirty threshold and bdi_dirty rush very high (for example, 2 times higher than bdi_thresh). During which time balance_dirty_pages() is not called at all. So the problems are 1) The random writes progress so slow that they break the assumption of the max-pause logic that "8 pages per 200ms is typically more than enough to curb heavy dirtiers". 2) The max-pause logic ignored task_bdi_thresh and thus opens the possibility for some bdi's to over dirty pages, leading to (bdi_dirty >> bdi_thresh) and then (bdi_thresh >> bdi_dirty) for others. 3) The higher max-pause/pass-good thresholds somehow leads to the bad swing of dirty pages. The fix is to allow the task to slightly dirty over task_bdi_thresh, but no way to exceed bdi_dirty and/or global dirty_thresh. Tests show that it fixed the JBOD regression completely (both behavior and performance), while still being able to cut down large pause times in balance_dirty_pages() for single-disk cases. Reported-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com> Tested-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com> Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-26Merge branch 'for-linus' of ↵Linus Torvalds
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/writeback * 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/writeback: (27 commits) mm: properly reflect task dirty limits in dirty_exceeded logic writeback: don't busy retry writeback on new/freeing inodes writeback: scale IO chunk size up to half device bandwidth writeback: trace global_dirty_state writeback: introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits writeback: introduce smoothed global dirty limit writeback: consolidate variable names in balance_dirty_pages() writeback: show bdi write bandwidth in debugfs writeback: bdi write bandwidth estimation writeback: account per-bdi accumulated written pages writeback: make writeback_control.nr_to_write straight writeback: skip tmpfs early in balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr() writeback: trace event writeback_queue_io writeback: trace event writeback_single_inode writeback: remove .nonblocking and .encountered_congestion writeback: remove writeback_control.more_io writeback: skip balance_dirty_pages() for in-memory fs writeback: add bdi_dirty_limit() kernel-doc writeback: avoid extra sync work at enqueue time writeback: elevate queue_io() into wb_writeback() ... Fix up trivial conflicts in fs/fs-writeback.c and mm/filemap.c
2011-07-25writeback: account NR_WRITTEN at IO completion timeWu Fengguang
NR_WRITTEN is now accounted at block IO enqueue time, which is not very accurate as to common understanding. This moves NR_WRITTEN accounting to the IO completion time and makes it more consistent with BDI_WRITTEN, which is used for bandwidth estimation. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-07-25mm: remove useless rcu lock-unlock from mapping_tagged()Konstantin Khlebnikov
radix_tree_tagged() is lockless - it reads from a member of the raid-tree root node. It does not require any protection. Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@openvz.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-07-24mm: properly reflect task dirty limits in dirty_exceeded logicJan Kara
We set bdi->dirty_exceeded (and thus ratelimiting code starts to call balance_dirty_pages() every 8 pages) when a per-bdi limit is exceeded or global limit is exceeded. But per-bdi limit also depends on the task. Thus different tasks reach the limit on that bdi at different levels of dirty pages. The result is that with current code bdi->dirty_exceeded ping-ponged between 1 and 0 depending on which task just got into balance_dirty_pages(). We fix the issue by clearing bdi->dirty_exceeded only when per-bdi amount of dirty pages drops below the threshold (7/8 * bdi_dirty_limit) where task limits already do not have any influence. Impact: The end result is, the dirty pages are kept more tightly under control, with the average number slightly lowered than before. This reduces the risk to throttle light dirtiers and hence more responsive. However it may add overheads by enforcing balance_dirty_pages() calls on every 8 pages when there are 2+ heavy dirtiers. CC: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> CC: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09writeback: trace global_dirty_stateWu Fengguang
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 <fengguang.wu@intel.com>