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254 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Wu Fengguang
aed21ad28b writeback: comment on the bdi dirty threshold
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>
2011-12-08 10:49:20 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
468e6a20af writeback: remove vm_dirties and task->dirties
They are not used any more.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-17 20:49:06 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
1df647197c writeback: hard throttle 1000+ dd on a slow USB stick
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>
2011-11-17 20:39:32 +08:00
Jan Kara
499d05ecf9 mm: Make task in balance_dirty_pages() killable
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>
2011-11-16 19:53:44 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
3a73dbbc9b writeback: fix uninitialized task_ratelimit
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>
2011-11-07 19:19:28 +08:00
Linus Torvalds
32aaeffbd4 Merge branch 'modsplit-Oct31_2011' of 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
2011-11-06 19:44:47 -08:00
Linus Torvalds
208bca0860 Merge branch 'writeback-for-linus' of 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
2011-11-06 19:02:23 -08:00
Johannes Weiner
d08c429b06 mm/page-writeback.c: document bdi_min_ratio
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>
2011-10-31 17:30:45 -07:00
Paul Gortmaker
b95f1b31b7 mm: Map most files to use export.h instead of module.h
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>
2011-10-31 09:20:12 -04:00
Curt Wohlgemuth
0e175a1835 writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_work
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>
2011-10-31 00:33:36 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
ece13ac31b writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pages
Useful for analyzing the dynamics of the throttling algorithms and
debugging user reported problems.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31 00:29:38 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
b48c104d22 writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimit
It helps understand how various throttle bandwidths are updated.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31 00:29:21 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
50657fc4df writeback: fix ppc compile warnings on do_div(long long, unsigned long)
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>
2011-10-11 17:45:24 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
8927f66c4e writeback: dirty position control - bdi reserve area
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:58 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
57fc978cfb writeback: control dirty pause time
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:58 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
c8462cc9de writeback: limit max dirty pause time
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
143dfe8611 writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages()
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
9d823e8f6b writeback: per task dirty rate limit
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
7381131cbc writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimit
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
be3ffa2764 writeback: dirty rate control
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
af6a311384 writeback: add bg_threshold parameter to __bdi_update_bandwidth()
No behavior change.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
6c14ae1e92 writeback: dirty position control
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
c8e28ce049 writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pages
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>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
bb0822954a squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good area
Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609ab ("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>
2011-08-19 22:42:07 +08:00
Linus Torvalds
f01ef569cd Merge branch 'for-linus' of 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
2011-07-26 10:39:54 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
99b12e3d88 writeback: account NR_WRITTEN at IO completion time
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>
2011-07-25 20:57:11 -07:00
Konstantin Khlebnikov
72c4783210 mm: remove useless rcu lock-unlock from mapping_tagged()
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>
2011-07-25 20:57:11 -07:00
Jan Kara
bcff25fc8a mm: properly reflect task dirty limits in dirty_exceeded logic
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>
2011-07-24 10:51:52 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
e1cbe23601 writeback: trace global_dirty_state
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>
2011-07-09 22:09:03 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
ffd1f609ab writeback: introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits
The max-pause limit helps to keep the sleep time inside
balance_dirty_pages() within MAX_PAUSE=200ms. The 200ms max sleep means
per task rate limit of 8pages/200ms=160KB/s when dirty exceeded, which
normally is enough to stop dirtiers from continue pushing the dirty
pages high, unless there are a sufficient large number of slow dirtiers
(eg. 500 tasks doing 160KB/s will still sum up to 80MB/s, exceeding the
write bandwidth of a slow disk and hence accumulating more and more dirty
pages).

The pass-good limit helps to let go of the good bdi's in the presence of
a blocked bdi (ie. NFS server not responding) or slow USB disk which for
some reason build up a large number of initial dirty pages that refuse
to go away anytime soon.

For example, given two bdi's A and B and the initial state

	bdi_thresh_A = dirty_thresh / 2
	bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh / 2
	bdi_dirty_A  = dirty_thresh / 2
	bdi_dirty_B  = dirty_thresh / 2

Then A get blocked, after a dozen seconds

	bdi_thresh_A = 0
	bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh
	bdi_dirty_A  = dirty_thresh / 2
	bdi_dirty_B  = dirty_thresh / 2

The (bdi_dirty_B < bdi_thresh_B) test is now useless and the dirty pages
will be effectively throttled by condition (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh).
This has two problems:
(1) we lose the protections for light dirtiers
(2) balance_dirty_pages() effectively becomes IO-less because the
    (bdi_nr_reclaimable > bdi_thresh) test won't be true. This is good
    for IO, but balance_dirty_pages() loses an important way to break
    out of the loop which leads to more spread out throttle delays.

DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA can eliminate the above issues. The only problem is,
DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA needs to be defined as 2 to fully cover the above
example while this patch uses the more conservative value 8 so as not to
surprise people with too many dirty pages than expected.

The max-pause limit won't noticeably impact the speed dirty pages are
knocked down when there is a sudden drop of global/bdi dirty thresholds.
Because the heavy dirties will be throttled below 160KB/s which is slow
enough. It does help to avoid long dirty throttle delays and especially
will make light dirtiers more responsive.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09 22:09:02 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
c42843f2f0 writeback: introduce smoothed global dirty limit
The start of a heavy weight application (ie. KVM) may instantly knock
down determine_dirtyable_memory() if the swap is not enabled or full.
global_dirty_limits() and bdi_dirty_limit() will in turn get global/bdi
dirty thresholds that are _much_ lower than the global/bdi dirty pages.

balance_dirty_pages() will then heavily throttle all dirtiers including
the light ones, until the dirty pages drop below the new dirty thresholds.
During this _deep_ dirty-exceeded state, the system may appear rather
unresponsive to the users.

About "deep" dirty-exceeded: task_dirty_limit() assigns 1/8 lower dirty
threshold to heavy dirtiers than light ones, and the dirty pages will
be throttled around the heavy dirtiers' dirty threshold and reasonably
below the light dirtiers' dirty threshold. In this state, only the heavy
dirtiers will be throttled and the dirty pages are carefully controlled
to not exceed the light dirtiers' dirty threshold. However if the
threshold itself suddenly drops below the number of dirty pages, the
light dirtiers will get heavily throttled.

So introduce global_dirty_limit for tracking the global dirty threshold
with policies

- follow downwards slowly
- follow up in one shot

global_dirty_limit can effectively mask out the impact of sudden drop of
dirtyable memory. It will be used in the next patch for two new type of
dirty limits. Note that the new dirty limits are not going to avoid
throttling the light dirtiers, but could limit their sleep time to 200ms.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09 22:09:02 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
7762741e3a writeback: consolidate variable names in balance_dirty_pages()
Introduce

	nr_dirty = NR_FILE_DIRTY + NR_WRITEBACK + NR_UNSTABLE_NFS

in order to simplify many tests in the following patches.

balance_dirty_pages() will eventually care only about the dirty sums
besides nr_writeback.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09 22:09:02 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
e98be2d599 writeback: bdi write bandwidth estimation
The estimation value will start from 100MB/s and adapt to the real
bandwidth in seconds.

It tries to update the bandwidth only when disk is fully utilized.
Any inactive period of more than one second will be skipped.

The estimated bandwidth will be reflecting how fast the device can
writeout when _fully utilized_, and won't drop to 0 when it goes idle.
The value will remain constant at disk idle time. At busy write time, if
not considering fluctuations, it will also remain high unless be knocked
down by possible concurrent reads that compete for the disk time and
bandwidth with async writes.

The estimation is not done purely in the flusher because there is no
guarantee for write_cache_pages() to return timely to update bandwidth.

The bdi->avg_write_bandwidth smoothing is very effective for filtering
out sudden spikes, however may be a little biased in long term.

The overheads are low because the bdi bandwidth update only occurs at
200ms intervals.

The 200ms update interval is suitable, because it's not possible to get
the real bandwidth for the instance at all, due to large fluctuations.

The NFS commits can be as large as seconds worth of data. One XFS
completion may be as large as half second worth of data if we are going
to increase the write chunk to half second worth of data. In ext4,
fluctuations with time period of around 5 seconds is observed. And there
is another pattern of irregular periods of up to 20 seconds on SSD tests.

That's why we are not only doing the estimation at 200ms intervals, but
also averaging them over a period of 3 seconds and then go further to do
another level of smoothing in avg_write_bandwidth.

CC: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09 22:09:01 -07:00
Jan Kara
f7d2b1ecd0 writeback: account per-bdi accumulated written pages
Introduce the BDI_WRITTEN counter. It will be used for estimating the
bdi's write bandwidth.

Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>:
Move BDI_WRITTEN accounting into __bdi_writeout_inc().
This will cover and fix fuse, which only calls bdi_writeout_inc().

CC: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
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>
2011-07-09 22:09:01 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
d46db3d582 writeback: make writeback_control.nr_to_write straight
Pass struct wb_writeback_work all the way down to writeback_sb_inodes(),
and initialize the struct writeback_control there.

struct writeback_control is basically designed to control writeback of a
single file, but we keep abuse it for writing multiple files in
writeback_sb_inodes() and its callers.

It immediately clean things up, e.g. suddenly wbc.nr_to_write vs
work->nr_pages starts to make sense, and instead of saving and restoring
pages_skipped in writeback_sb_inodes it can always start with a clean
zero value.

It also makes a neat IO pattern change: large dirty files are now
written in the full 4MB writeback chunk size, rather than whatever
remained quota in wbc->nr_to_write.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Proposed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09 22:09:01 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
36715cef07 writeback: skip tmpfs early in balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr()
This helps prevent tmpfs dirtiers from skewing the per-cpu bdp_ratelimits.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-20 00:25:46 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
3efaf0faba writeback: skip balance_dirty_pages() for in-memory fs
This avoids unnecessary checks and dirty throttling on tmpfs/ramfs.

Notes about the tmpfs/ramfs behavior changes:

As for 2.6.36 and older kernels, the tmpfs writes will sleep inside
balance_dirty_pages() as long as we are over the (dirty+background)/2
global throttle threshold.  This is because both the dirty pages and
threshold will be 0 for tmpfs/ramfs. Hence this test will always
evaluate to TRUE:

                dirty_exceeded =
                        (bdi_nr_reclaimable + bdi_nr_writeback >= bdi_thresh)
                        || (nr_reclaimable + nr_writeback >= dirty_thresh);

For 2.6.37, someone complained that the current logic does not allow the
users to set vm.dirty_ratio=0.  So commit 4cbec4c8b9 changed the test to

                dirty_exceeded =
                        (bdi_nr_reclaimable + bdi_nr_writeback > bdi_thresh)
                        || (nr_reclaimable + nr_writeback > dirty_thresh);

So 2.6.37 will behave differently for tmpfs/ramfs: it will never get
throttled unless the global dirty threshold is exceeded (which is very
unlikely to happen; once happen, will block many tasks).

I'd say that the 2.6.36 behavior is very bad for tmpfs/ramfs. It means
for a busy writing server, tmpfs write()s may get livelocked! The
"inadvertent" throttling can hardly bring help to any workload because
of its "either no throttling, or get throttled to death" property.

So based on 2.6.37, this patch won't bring more noticeable changes.

CC: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:22 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
6f71865627 writeback: add bdi_dirty_limit() kernel-doc
Clarify the bdi_dirty_limit() comment.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:22 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
6e6938b6d3 writeback: introduce .tagged_writepages for the WB_SYNC_NONE sync stage
sync(2) is performed in two stages: the WB_SYNC_NONE sync and the
WB_SYNC_ALL sync. Identify the first stage with .tagged_writepages and
do livelock prevention for it, too.

Jan's commit f446daaea9 ("mm: implement writeback livelock avoidance
using page tagging") is a partial fix in that it only fixed the
WB_SYNC_ALL phase livelock.

Although ext4 is tested to no longer livelock with commit f446daaea9,
it may due to some "redirty_tail() after pages_skipped" effect which
is by no means a guarantee for _all_ the file systems.

Note that writeback_inodes_sb() is called by not only sync(), they are
treated the same because the other callers also need livelock prevention.

Impact:  It changes the order in which pages/inodes are synced to disk.
Now in the WB_SYNC_NONE stage, it won't proceed to write the next inode
until finished with the current inode.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:20 +08:00
Linus Torvalds
6c51038900 Merge branch 'for-2.6.39/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block
* 'for-2.6.39/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block: (65 commits)
  Documentation/iostats.txt: bit-size reference etc.
  cfq-iosched: removing unnecessary think time checking
  cfq-iosched: Don't clear queue stats when preempt.
  blk-throttle: Reset group slice when limits are changed
  blk-cgroup: Only give unaccounted_time under debug
  cfq-iosched: Don't set active queue in preempt
  block: fix non-atomic access to genhd inflight structures
  block: attempt to merge with existing requests on plug flush
  block: NULL dereference on error path in __blkdev_get()
  cfq-iosched: Don't update group weights when on service tree
  fs: assign sb->s_bdi to default_backing_dev_info if the bdi is going away
  block: Require subsystems to explicitly allocate bio_set integrity mempool
  jbd2: finish conversion from WRITE_SYNC_PLUG to WRITE_SYNC and explicit plugging
  jbd: finish conversion from WRITE_SYNC_PLUG to WRITE_SYNC and explicit plugging
  fs: make fsync_buffers_list() plug
  mm: make generic_writepages() use plugging
  blk-cgroup: Add unaccounted time to timeslice_used.
  block: fixup plugging stubs for !CONFIG_BLOCK
  block: remove obsolete comments for blkdev_issue_zeroout.
  blktrace: Use rq->cmd_flags directly in blk_add_trace_rq.
  ...

Fix up conflicts in fs/{aio.c,super.c}
2011-03-24 10:16:26 -07:00
Jun'ichi Nomura
cf15b07cf4 writeback: make mapping->writeback_index to point to the last written page
For range-cyclic writeback (e.g.  kupdate), the writeback code sets a
continuation point of the next writeback to mapping->writeback_index which
is set the page after the last written page.  This happens so that we
evenly write the whole file even if pages in it get continuously
redirtied.

However, in some cases, sequential writer is writing in the middle of the
page and it just redirties the last written page by continuing from that.
For example with an application which uses a file as a big ring buffer we
see:

[1st writeback session]
       ...
       flush-8:0-2743  4571: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898514 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4571: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898522 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4571: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898530 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4571: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898538 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4571: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898546 + 8
     kworker/0:1-11    4571: block_rq_issue: 8,0 W 0 () 94898514 + 40
>>     flush-8:0-2743  4571: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898554 + 8
>>     flush-8:0-2743  4571: block_rq_issue: 8,0 W 0 () 94898554 + 8

[2nd writeback session after 35sec]
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898562 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898570 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898578 + 8
       ...
     kworker/0:1-11    4606: block_rq_issue: 8,0 W 0 () 94898562 + 640
     kworker/0:1-11    4606: block_rq_issue: 8,0 W 0 () 94899202 + 72
       ...
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94899962 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94899970 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94899978 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94899986 + 8
       flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94899994 + 8
     kworker/0:1-11    4606: block_rq_issue: 8,0 W 0 () 94899962 + 40
>>     flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_bio_queue: 8,0 W 94898554 + 8
>>     flush-8:0-2743  4606: block_rq_issue: 8,0 W 0 () 94898554 + 8

So we seeked back to 94898554 after we wrote all the pages at the end of
the file.

This extra seek seems unnecessary.  If we continue writeback from the last
written page, we can avoid it and do not cause harm to other cases.  The
original intent of even writeout over the whole file is preserved and if
the page does not get redirtied pagevec_lookup_tag() just skips it.

As an exceptional case, when I/O error happens, set done_index to the next
page as the comment in the code suggests.

Tested-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jun'ichi Nomura <j-nomura@ce.jp.nec.com>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-03-22 17:44:09 -07:00
Minchan Kim
278df9f451 mm: reclaim invalidated page ASAP
invalidate_mapping_pages is very big hint to reclaimer.  It means user
doesn't want to use the page any more.  So in order to prevent working set
page eviction, this patch move the page into tail of inactive list by
PG_reclaim.

Please, remember that pages in inactive list are working set as well as
active list.  If we don't move pages into inactive list's tail, pages near
by tail of inactive list can be evicted although we have a big clue about
useless pages.  It's totally bad.

Now PG_readahead/PG_reclaim is shared.  fe3cba17 added ClearPageReclaim
into clear_page_dirty_for_io for preventing fast reclaiming readahead
marker page.

In this series, PG_reclaim is used by invalidated page, too.  If VM find
the page is invalidated and it's dirty, it sets PG_reclaim to reclaim
asap.  Then, when the dirty page will be writeback,
clear_page_dirty_for_io will clear PG_reclaim unconditionally.  It
disturbs this serie's goal.

I think it's okay to clear PG_readahead when the page is dirty, not
writeback time.  So this patch moves ClearPageReadahead.  In v4,
ClearPageReadahead in set_page_dirty has a problem which is reported by
Steven Barrett.  It's due to compound page.  Some driver(ex, audio) calls
set_page_dirty with compound page which isn't on LRU.  but my patch does
ClearPageRelcaim on compound page.  In non-CONFIG_PAGEFLAGS_EXTENDED, it
breaks PageTail flag.

I think it doesn't affect THP and pass my test with THP enabling but Cced
Andrea for double check.

Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reported-by: Steven Barrett <damentz@liquorix.net>
Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-03-22 17:44:04 -07:00
Shaohua Li
9b6096a65f mm: make generic_writepages() use plugging
This recovers a performance regression caused by the removal
of the per-device plugging.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2011-03-17 10:47:06 +01:00
Jens Axboe
7eaceaccab block: remove per-queue plugging
Code has been converted over to the new explicit on-stack plugging,
and delay users have been converted to use the new API for that.
So lets kill off the old plugging along with aops->sync_page().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2011-03-10 08:52:07 +01:00
Minchan Kim
240c879f20 writeback: avoid unnecessary determine_dirtyable_memory call
I think determine_dirtyable_memory() is a rather costly function since it
need many atomic reads for gathering zone/global page state.  But when we
use vm_dirty_bytes && dirty_background_bytes, we don't need that costly
calculation.

This patch eliminates such unnecessary overhead.

NOTE : newly added if condition might add overhead in normal path.
       But it should be _really_ small because anyway we need the
       access both vm_dirty_bytes and dirty_background_bytes so it is
       likely to hit the cache.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix used-uninitialised warning]
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-01-13 17:32:38 -08:00
Bob Liu
c3f0da6315 mm/page-writeback.c: fix __set_page_dirty_no_writeback() return value
__set_page_dirty_no_writeback() should return true if it actually
transitioned the page from a clean to dirty state although it seems nobody
uses its return value at present.

Signed-off-by: Bob Liu <lliubbo@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-01-13 17:32:32 -08:00
Linus Torvalds
008d23e485 Merge branch 'for-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial
* 'for-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial: (43 commits)
  Documentation/trace/events.txt: Remove obsolete sched_signal_send.
  writeback: fix global_dirty_limits comment runtime -> real-time
  ppc: fix comment typo singal -> signal
  drivers: fix comment typo diable -> disable.
  m68k: fix comment typo diable -> disable.
  wireless: comment typo fix diable -> disable.
  media: comment typo fix diable -> disable.
  remove doc for obsolete dynamic-printk kernel-parameter
  remove extraneous 'is' from Documentation/iostats.txt
  Fix spelling milisec -> ms in snd_ps3 module parameter description
  Fix spelling mistakes in comments
  Revert conflicting V4L changes
  i7core_edac: fix typos in comments
  mm/rmap.c: fix comment
  sound, ca0106: Fix assignment to 'channel'.
  hrtimer: fix a typo in comment
  init/Kconfig: fix typo
  anon_inodes: fix wrong function name in comment
  fix comment typos concerning "consistent"
  poll: fix a typo in comment
  ...

Fix up trivial conflicts in:
 - drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwl-core.c (moved to iwl-legacy.c)
 - fs/ext4/ext4.h

Also fix missed 'diabled' typo in drivers/net/bnx2x/bnx2x.h while at it.
2011-01-13 10:05:56 -08:00
Minchan Kim
ebd1373d40 writeback: fix global_dirty_limits comment runtime -> real-time
Change runtime with real-time

Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2011-01-04 11:09:29 +01:00
Wu Fengguang
d153ba6445 writeback: do uninterruptible sleep in balance_dirty_pages()
Using TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE in balance_dirty_pages() seems wrong.  If it's
going to do that then it must break out if signal_pending(), otherwise
it's pretty much guaranteed to degenerate into a busywait loop.  Plus we
*do* want these processes to appear in D state and to contribute to load
average.

So it should be TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE.                 -- Andrew Morton

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-12-22 19:43:33 -08:00
Wu Fengguang
4cbec4c8b9 writeback: remove the internal 5% low bound on dirty_ratio
The dirty_ratio was silently limited in global_dirty_limits() to >= 5%.
This is not a user expected behavior.  And it's inconsistent with
calc_period_shift(), which uses the plain vm_dirty_ratio value.

Let's remove the internal bound.

At the same time, fix balance_dirty_pages() to work with the
dirty_thresh=0 case.  This allows applications to proceed when
dirty+writeback pages are all cleaned.

And ">" fits with the name "exceeded" better than ">=" does.  Neil thinks
it is an aesthetic improvement as well as a functional one :)

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Proposed-by: Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.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>
2010-10-26 16:52:08 -07:00
Michael Rubin
ea941f0e2a writeback: add nr_dirtied and nr_written to /proc/vmstat
To help developers and applications gain visibility into writeback
behaviour adding two entries to vm_stat_items and /proc/vmstat.  This will
allow us to track the "written" and "dirtied" counts.

   # grep nr_dirtied /proc/vmstat
   nr_dirtied 3747
   # grep nr_written /proc/vmstat
   nr_written 3618

Signed-off-by: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-10-26 16:52:06 -07:00
Michael Rubin
f629d1c9bd mm: add account_page_writeback()
To help developers and applications gain visibility into writeback
behaviour this patch adds two counters to /proc/vmstat.

  # grep nr_dirtied /proc/vmstat
  nr_dirtied 3747
  # grep nr_written /proc/vmstat
  nr_written 3618

These entries allow user apps to understand writeback behaviour over time
and learn how it is impacting their performance.  Currently there is no
way to inspect dirty and writeback speed over time.  It's not possible for
nr_dirty/nr_writeback.

These entries are necessary to give visibility into writeback behaviour.
We have /proc/diskstats which lets us understand the io in the block
layer.  We have blktrace for more in depth understanding.  We have
e2fsprogs and debugsfs to give insight into the file systems behaviour,
but we don't offer our users the ability understand what writeback is
doing.  There is no way to know how active it is over the whole system, if
it's falling behind or to quantify it's efforts.  With these values
exported users can easily see how much data applications are sending
through writeback and also at what rates writeback is processing this
data.  Comparing the rates of change between the two allow developers to
see when writeback is not able to keep up with incoming traffic and the
rate of dirty memory being sent to the IO back end.  This allows folks to
understand their io workloads and track kernel issues.  Non kernel
engineers at Google often use these counters to solve puzzling performance
problems.

Patch #4 adds a pernode vmstat file with nr_dirtied and nr_written

Patch #5 add writeback thresholds to /proc/vmstat

Currently these values are in debugfs. But they should be promoted to
/proc since they are useful for developers who are writing databases
and file servers and are not debugging the kernel.

The output is as below:

 # grep threshold /proc/vmstat
 nr_pages_dirty_threshold 409111
 nr_pages_dirty_background_threshold 818223

This patch:

This allows code outside of the mm core to safely manipulate page
writeback state and not worry about the other accounting.  Not using these
routines means that some code will lose track of the accounting and we get
bugs.

Modify nilfs2 to use interface.

Signed-off-by: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: KONISHI Ryusuke <konishi.ryusuke@lab.ntt.co.jp>
Cc: Jiro SEKIBA <jir@unicus.jp>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-10-26 16:52:06 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
997396a73a Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sage/ceph-client
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sage/ceph-client:
  ceph: fix get_ticket_handler() error handling
  ceph: don't BUG on ENOMEM during mds reconnect
  ceph: ceph_mdsc_build_path() returns an ERR_PTR
  ceph: Fix warnings
  ceph: ceph_get_inode() returns an ERR_PTR
  ceph: initialize fields on new dentry_infos
  ceph: maintain i_head_snapc when any caps are dirty, not just for data
  ceph: fix osd request lru adjustment when sending request
  ceph: don't improperly set dir complete when holding EXCL cap
  mm: exporting account_page_dirty
  ceph: direct requests in snapped namespace based on nonsnap parent
  ceph: queue cap snap writeback for realm children on snap update
  ceph: include dirty xattrs state in snapped caps
  ceph: fix xattr cap writeback
  ceph: fix multiple mds session shutdown
2010-08-28 14:07:20 -07:00
Dave Chinner
546a192422 writeback: write_cache_pages doesn't terminate at nr_to_write <= 0
I noticed XFS writeback in 2.6.36-rc1 was much slower than it should have
been. Enabling writeback tracing showed:

    flush-253:16-8516  [007] 1342952.351608: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=1024 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [007] 1342952.351654: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=1023 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [000] 1342952.369520: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=0 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [000] 1342952.369542: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=-1 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [000] 1342952.369549: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=-2 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0

Writeback is not terminating in background writeback if ->writepage is
returning with wbc->nr_to_write == 0, resulting in sub-optimal single page
writeback on XFS.

Fix the write_cache_pages loop to terminate correctly when this situation
occurs and so prevent this sub-optimal background writeback pattern. This
improves sustained sequential buffered write performance from around
250MB/s to 750MB/s for a 100GB file on an XFS filesystem on my 8p test VM.

Cc:<stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
2010-08-24 11:44:34 +10:00
Michael Rubin
679ceace84 mm: exporting account_page_dirty
This allows code outside of the mm core to safely manipulate page state
and not worry about the other accounting. Not using these routines means
that some code will lose track of the accounting and we get bugs. This
has happened once already.

Signed-off-by: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Sage Weil <sage@newdream.net>
2010-08-22 15:16:51 -07:00
Jan Kara
d5ed3a4af7 lib/radix-tree.c: fix overflow in radix_tree_range_tag_if_tagged()
When radix_tree_maxindex() is ~0UL, it can happen that scanning overflows
index and tree traversal code goes astray reading memory until it hits
unreadable memory.  Check for overflow and exit in that case.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-20 09:34:55 -07:00
Randy Dunlap
03ab450f03 mm/page-writeback: fix non-kernel-doc function comments
Remove leading /** from non-kernel-doc function comments to prevent
kernel-doc warnings.

Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-14 16:20:59 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
1babe18385 writeback: add comment to the dirty limit functions
Document global_dirty_limits() and bdi_dirty_limit().

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-12 08:43:30 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
16c4042f08 writeback: avoid unnecessary calculation of bdi dirty thresholds
Split get_dirty_limits() into global_dirty_limits()+bdi_dirty_limit(), so
that the latter can be avoided when under global dirty background
threshold (which is the normal state for most systems).

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-12 08:43:29 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
e50e37201a writeback: balance_dirty_pages(): reduce calls to global_page_state
Reducing the number of times balance_dirty_pages calls global_page_state
reduces the cache references and so improves write performance on a
variety of workloads.

'perf stats' of simple fio write tests shows the reduction in cache
access.  Where the test is fio 'write,mmap,600Mb,pre_read' on AMD AthlonX2
with 3Gb memory (dirty_threshold approx 600 Mb) running each test 10
times, dropping the fasted & slowest values then taking the average &
standard deviation

		average (s.d.) in millions (10^6)
2.6.31-rc8	648.6 (14.6)
+patch		620.1 (16.5)

Achieving this reduction is by dropping clip_bdi_dirty_limit as it rereads
the counters to apply the dirty_threshold and moving this check up into
balance_dirty_pages where it has already read the counters.

Also by rearrange the for loop to only contain one copy of the limit tests
allows the pdflush test after the loop to use the local copies of the
counters rather than rereading them.

In the common case with no throttling it now calls global_page_state 5
fewer times and bdi_stat 2 fewer.

Fengguang:

This patch slightly changes behavior by replacing clip_bdi_dirty_limit()
with the explicit check (nr_reclaimable + nr_writeback >= dirty_thresh) to
avoid exceeding the dirty limit.  Since the bdi dirty limit is mostly
accurate we don't need to do routinely clip.  A simple dirty limit check
would be enough.

The check is necessary because, in principle we should throttle everything
calling balance_dirty_pages() when we're over the total limit, as said by
Peter.

We now set and clear dirty_exceeded not only based on bdi dirty limits,
but also on the global dirty limit.  The global limit check is added in
place of clip_bdi_dirty_limit() for safety and not intended as a behavior
change.  The bdi limits should be tight enough to keep all dirty pages
under the global limit at most time; occasional small exceeding should be
OK though.  The change makes the logic more obvious: the global limit is
the ultimate goal and shall be always imposed.

We may now start background writeback work based on outdated conditions.
That's safe because the bdi flush thread will (and have to) double check
the states.  It reduces overall overheads because the test based on old
states still have good chance to be right.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org] fix uninitialized dirty_exceeded
Signed-off-by: Richard Kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-12 08:43:29 -07:00
Randy Dunlap
3c111a071d mm: fix fatal kernel-doc error
Fix a fatal kernel-doc error due to a #define coming between a function's
kernel-doc notation and the function signature.  (kernel-doc cannot handle
this)

Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-12 08:43:29 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
2f9e825d3e Merge branch 'for-2.6.36' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block
* 'for-2.6.36' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block: (149 commits)
  block: make sure that REQ_* types are seen even with CONFIG_BLOCK=n
  xen-blkfront: fix missing out label
  blkdev: fix blkdev_issue_zeroout return value
  block: update request stacking methods to support discards
  block: fix missing export of blk_types.h
  writeback: fix bad _bh spinlock nesting
  drbd: revert "delay probes", feature is being re-implemented differently
  drbd: Initialize all members of sync_conf to their defaults [Bugz 315]
  drbd: Disable delay probes for the upcomming release
  writeback: cleanup bdi_register
  writeback: add new tracepoints
  writeback: remove unnecessary init_timer call
  writeback: optimize periodic bdi thread wakeups
  writeback: prevent unnecessary bdi threads wakeups
  writeback: move bdi threads exiting logic to the forker thread
  writeback: restructure bdi forker loop a little
  writeback: move last_active to bdi
  writeback: do not remove bdi from bdi_list
  writeback: simplify bdi code a little
  writeback: do not lose wake-ups in bdi threads
  ...

Fixed up pretty trivial conflicts in drivers/block/virtio_blk.c and
drivers/scsi/scsi_error.c as per Jens.
2010-08-10 15:22:42 -07:00
Jan Kara
f446daaea9 mm: implement writeback livelock avoidance using page tagging
We try to avoid livelocks of writeback when some steadily creates dirty
pages in a mapping we are writing out.  For memory-cleaning writeback,
using nr_to_write works reasonably well but we cannot really use it for
data integrity writeback.  This patch tries to solve the problem.

The idea is simple: Tag all pages that should be written back with a
special tag (TOWRITE) in the radix tree.  This can be done rather quickly
and thus livelocks should not happen in practice.  Then we start doing the
hard work of locking pages and sending them to disk only for those pages
that have TOWRITE tag set.

Note: Adding new radix tree tag grows radix tree node from 288 to 296
bytes for 32-bit archs and from 552 to 560 bytes for 64-bit archs.
However, the number of slab/slub items per page remains the same (13 and 7
respectively).

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-09 20:44:59 -07:00
Dave Chinner
9e094383b6 writeback: Add tracing to write_cache_pages
Add a trace event to the ->writepage loop in write_cache_pages to give
visibility into how the ->writepage call is changing variables within the
writeback control structure. Of most interest is how wbc->nr_to_write changes
from call to call, especially with filesystems that write multiple pages
in ->writepage.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-08-07 18:24:26 +02:00
Dave Chinner
028c2dd184 writeback: Add tracing to balance_dirty_pages
Tracing high level background writeback events is good, but it doesn't
give the entire picture. Add visibility into write throttling to catch IO
dispatched by foreground throttling of processing dirtying lots of pages.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-08-07 18:24:25 +02:00
Christoph Hellwig
9c3a8ee8a1 writeback: remove writeback_inodes_wbc
This was just an odd wrapper around writeback_inodes_wb.  Removing this
also allows to get rid of the bdi member of struct writeback_control
which was rather out of place there.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-07-06 08:54:03 +02:00
Christoph Hellwig
c5444198ca writeback: simplify and split bdi_start_writeback
bdi_start_writeback now never gets a superblock passed, so we can just remove
that case.  And to further untangle the code and flatten the call stack
split it into two trivial helpers for it's two callers.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-06-11 12:58:08 +02:00
Dave Chinner
d87815cb20 writeback: limit write_cache_pages integrity scanning to current EOF
sync can currently take a really long time if a concurrent writer is
extending a file. The problem is that the dirty pages on the address
space grow in the same direction as write_cache_pages scans, so if
the writer keeps ahead of writeback, the writeback will not
terminate until the writer stops adding dirty pages.

For a data integrity sync, we only need to write the pages dirty at
the time we start the writeback, so we can stop scanning once we get
to the page that was at the end of the file at the time the scan
started.

This will prevent operations like copying a large file preventing
sync from completing as it will not write back pages that were
dirtied after the sync was started. This does not impact the
existing integrity guarantees, as any dirty page (old or new)
within the EOF range at the start of the scan will still be
captured.

This patch will not prevent sync from blocking on large writes into
holes. That requires more complex intervention while this patch only
addresses the common append-case of this sync holdoff.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-06-08 18:12:44 -07:00
Dave Chinner
0b5649278e writeback: pay attention to wbc->nr_to_write in write_cache_pages
If a filesystem writes more than one page in ->writepage, write_cache_pages
fails to notice this and continues to attempt writeback when wbc->nr_to_write
has gone negative - this trace was captured from XFS:

    wbc_writeback_start: towrt=1024
    wbc_writepage: towrt=1024
    wbc_writepage: towrt=0
    wbc_writepage: towrt=-1
    wbc_writepage: towrt=-5
    wbc_writepage: towrt=-21
    wbc_writepage: towrt=-85

This has adverse effects on filesystem writeback behaviour. write_cache_pages()
needs to terminate after a certain number of pages are written, not after a
certain number of calls to ->writepage are made.  This is a regression
introduced by 17bc6c30cf ("vfs: Add
no_nrwrite_index_update writeback control flag"), but cannot be reverted
directly due to subsequent bug fixes that have gone in on top of it.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-06-08 18:12:44 -07:00
Jens Axboe
0e3c9a2284 Revert "writeback: fix WB_SYNC_NONE writeback from umount"
This reverts commit e913fc825d.

We are investigating a hang associated with the WB_SYNC_NONE changes,
so revert them for now.

Conflicts:

	fs/fs-writeback.c
	mm/page-writeback.c

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-06-01 11:08:43 +02:00
Jens Axboe
df96e96f76 writeback: fix mixed up arguments to bdi_start_writeback()
The laptop mode timer had the nr_pages and sb_locked arguments
mixed up.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2010-05-21 20:01:54 +02:00
Jens Axboe
c2c4986edd writeback: fix problem with !CONFIG_BLOCK compilation
When CONFIG_BLOCK isn't enabled:

mm/page-writeback.c: In function 'laptop_mode_timer_fn':
mm/page-writeback.c:708: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
mm/page-writeback.c:709: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type

Fix this by essentially eliminating the laptop sync handlers when
CONFIG_BLOCK isn't set, as most are only used from the block layer code.
The exception is laptop_sync_completion() which is used from sys_sync(),
make that an empty declaration in that case.

Reported-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2010-05-21 20:01:03 +02:00
Jens Axboe
6423104b6a writeback: fixups for !dirty_writeback_centisecs
Commit 69b62d01 fixed up most of the places where we would enter
busy schedule() spins when disabling the periodic background
writeback. This fixes up the sb timer so that it doesn't get
hammered on with the delay disabled, and ensures that it gets
rearmed if needed when /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
gets modified.

bdi_forker_task() also needs to check for !dirty_writeback_centisecs
and use schedule() appropriately, fix that up too.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2010-05-21 20:00:35 +02:00
Jens Axboe
e913fc825d writeback: fix WB_SYNC_NONE writeback from umount
When umount calls sync_filesystem(), we first do a WB_SYNC_NONE
writeback to kick off writeback of pending dirty inodes, then follow
that up with a WB_SYNC_ALL to wait for it. Since umount already holds
the sb s_umount mutex, WB_SYNC_NONE ends up doing nothing and all
writeback happens as WB_SYNC_ALL. This can greatly slow down umount,
since WB_SYNC_ALL writeback is a data integrity operation and thus
a bigger hammer than simple WB_SYNC_NONE. For barrier aware file systems
it's a lot slower.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2010-05-17 12:55:07 +02:00
Matthew Garrett
31373d09da laptop-mode: Make flushes per-device
One of the features of laptop-mode is that it forces a writeout of dirty
pages if something else triggers a physical read or write from a device.
The current implementation flushes pages on all devices, rather than only
the one that triggered the flush. This patch alters the behaviour so that
only the recently accessed block device is flushed, preventing other
disks being spun up for no terribly good reason.

Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett <mjg@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2010-04-06 14:25:14 +02:00
Wu Fengguang
0d99519efe writeback: remove unused nonblocking and congestion checks
- no one is calling wb_writeback and write_cache_pages with
  wbc.nonblocking=1 any more
- lumpy pageout will want to do nonblocking writeback without the
  congestion wait

So remove the congestion checks as suggested by Chris.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@ioremap.net>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-12-03 13:54:25 +01:00
Wu Fengguang
d25105e891 writeback: account IO throttling wait as iowait
It makes sense to do IOWAIT when someone is blocked
due to IO throttle, as suggested by Kame and Peter.

There is an old comment for not doing IOWAIT on throttle,
however it has been mismatching the code for a long time.

If we stop accounting IOWAIT for 2.6.32, it could be an
undesirable behavior change. So restore the io_schedule.

CC: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-10-09 12:40:42 +02:00
Jens Axboe
a72bfd4dea writeback: pass in super_block to bdi_start_writeback()
Sometimes we only want to write pages from a specific super_block,
so allow that to be passed in.

This fixes a problem with commit 56a131dcf7
causing writeback on all super_blocks on a bdi, where we only really
want to sync a specific sb from writeback_inodes_sb().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-26 00:10:40 +02:00
Linus Torvalds
6d7f18f6ea Merge branch 'writeback' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block
* 'writeback' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block:
  writeback: writeback_inodes_sb() should use bdi_start_writeback()
  writeback: don't delay inodes redirtied by a fast dirtier
  writeback: make the super_block pinning more efficient
  writeback: don't resort for a single super_block in move_expired_inodes()
  writeback: move inodes from one super_block together
  writeback: get rid to incorrect references to pdflush in comments
  writeback: improve readability of the wb_writeback() continue/break logic
  writeback: cleanup writeback_single_inode()
  writeback: kupdate writeback shall not stop when more io is possible
  writeback: stop background writeback when below background threshold
  writeback: balance_dirty_pages() shall write more than dirtied pages
  fs: Fix busyloop in wb_writeback()
2009-09-25 09:27:30 -07:00
Jens Axboe
5b0830cb90 writeback: get rid to incorrect references to pdflush in comments
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-25 18:08:25 +02:00
Wu Fengguang
d3ddec7635 writeback: stop background writeback when below background threshold
Treat bdi_start_writeback(0) as a special request to do background write,
and stop such work when we are below the background dirty threshold.

Also simplify the (nr_pages <= 0) checks. Since we already pass in
nr_pages=LONG_MAX for WB_SYNC_ALL and background writes, we don't
need to worry about it being decreased to zero.

Reported-by: Richard Kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk>
CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-25 18:08:24 +02:00
Wu Fengguang
3a2e9a5a2a writeback: balance_dirty_pages() shall write more than dirtied pages
Some filesystem may choose to write much more than ratelimit_pages
before calling balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr(). So it is safer to
determine number to write based on real number of dirtied pages.

Otherwise it is possible that
  loop {
    btrfs_file_write():     dirty 1024 pages
    balance_dirty_pages():  write up to 48 pages (= ratelimit_pages * 1.5)
  }
in which the writeback rate cannot keep up with dirty rate, and the
dirty pages go all the way beyond dirty_thresh.

The increased write_chunk may make the dirtier more bumpy.
So filesystems shall be take care not to dirty too much at
a time (eg. > 4MB) without checking the ratelimit.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-25 18:08:24 +02:00
Linus Torvalds
db16826367 Merge branch 'hwpoison' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ak/linux-mce-2.6
* 'hwpoison' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ak/linux-mce-2.6: (21 commits)
  HWPOISON: Enable error_remove_page on btrfs
  HWPOISON: Add simple debugfs interface to inject hwpoison on arbitary PFNs
  HWPOISON: Add madvise() based injector for hardware poisoned pages v4
  HWPOISON: Enable error_remove_page for NFS
  HWPOISON: Enable .remove_error_page for migration aware file systems
  HWPOISON: The high level memory error handler in the VM v7
  HWPOISON: Add PR_MCE_KILL prctl to control early kill behaviour per process
  HWPOISON: shmem: call set_page_dirty() with locked page
  HWPOISON: Define a new error_remove_page address space op for async truncation
  HWPOISON: Add invalidate_inode_page
  HWPOISON: Refactor truncate to allow direct truncating of page v2
  HWPOISON: check and isolate corrupted free pages v2
  HWPOISON: Handle hardware poisoned pages in try_to_unmap
  HWPOISON: Use bitmask/action code for try_to_unmap behaviour
  HWPOISON: x86: Add VM_FAULT_HWPOISON handling to x86 page fault handler v2
  HWPOISON: Add poison check to page fault handling
  HWPOISON: Add basic support for poisoned pages in fault handler v3
  HWPOISON: Add new SIGBUS error codes for hardware poison signals
  HWPOISON: Add support for poison swap entries v2
  HWPOISON: Export some rmap vma locking to outside world
  ...
2009-09-24 07:53:22 -07:00
Alexey Dobriyan
8d65af789f sysctl: remove "struct file *" argument of ->proc_handler
It's unused.

It isn't needed -- read or write flag is already passed and sysctl
shouldn't care about the rest.

It _was_ used in two places at arch/frv for some reason.

Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-09-24 07:21:04 -07:00
Wu Fengguang
adea02a1be mm: count only reclaimable lru pages
global_lru_pages() / zone_lru_pages() can be used in two ways:
- to estimate max reclaimable pages in determine_dirtyable_memory()
- to calculate the slab scan ratio

When swap is full or not present, the anon lru lists are not reclaimable
and also won't be scanned.  So the anon pages shall not be counted in both
usage scenarios.  Also rename to _reclaimable_pages: now they are counting
the possibly reclaimable lru pages.

It can greatly (and correctly) increase the slab scan rate under high
memory pressure (when most file pages have been reclaimed and swap is
full/absent), thus reduce false OOM kills.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: "Li, Ming Chun" <macli@brc.ubc.ca>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-09-22 07:17:30 -07:00
Jens Axboe
87c6a9b253 writeback: make balance_dirty_pages() gradually back more off
Currently it just sleeps for a very short time, just 1 jiffy. If
we keep looping in there, continually delay for a little longer
of up to 100msec in total. That was the old limit for congestion
wait.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-21 15:40:33 +02:00
Jens Axboe
3542a5c0de writeback: don't use schedule_timeout() without setting runstate
Just use schedule_timeout_interruptible(), saves a call to
set_current_state().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-21 15:40:33 +02:00
Jens Axboe
b6e51316da writeback: separate starting of sync vs opportunistic writeback
bdi_start_writeback() is currently split into two paths, one for
WB_SYNC_NONE and one for WB_SYNC_ALL. Add bdi_sync_writeback()
for WB_SYNC_ALL writeback and let bdi_start_writeback() handle
only WB_SYNC_NONE.

Push down the writeback_control allocation and only accept the
parameters that make sense for each function. This cleans up
the API considerably.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-16 15:18:52 +02:00
Jens Axboe
cfc4ba5365 writeback: use RCU to protect bdi_list
Now that bdi_writeback_all() no longer handles integrity writeback,
it doesn't have to block anymore. This means that we can switch
bdi_list reader side protection to RCU.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-16 15:18:51 +02:00
Jens Axboe
1fe06ad892 writeback: get rid of wbc->for_writepages
It's only set, it's never checked. Kill it.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-16 15:16:18 +02:00
Wu Fengguang
6746aff74d HWPOISON: shmem: call set_page_dirty() with locked page
The dirtying of page and set_page_dirty() can be moved into the page lock.

- In shmem_write_end(), the page was dirtied while the page lock was held,
  but it's being marked dirty just after dropping the page lock.
- In shmem_symlink(), both dirtying and marking can be moved into page lock.

It's valuable for the hwpoison code to know whether one bad page can be dropped
without losing data. It mainly judges by testing the PG_dirty bit after taking
the page lock. So it becomes important that the dirtying of page and the
marking of dirtiness are both done inside the page lock. Which is a common
practice, but sadly not a rule.

The noticeable exceptions are
- mapped pages
- pages with buffer_heads
The above pages could go dirty at any time. Fortunately the hwpoison will
unmap the page and release the buffer_heads beforehand anyway.

Many other types of pages (eg. metadata pages) can also be dirtied at will by
their owners, the hwpoison code cannot do meaningful things to them anyway.
Only the dirtiness of pagecache pages owned by regular files are interested.

v2: AK: Add comment about set_page_dirty rules (suggested by Peter Zijlstra)

Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Reviewed-by: WANG Cong <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
2009-09-16 11:50:14 +02:00
Linus Torvalds
ada3fa1505 Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/percpu
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/percpu: (46 commits)
  powerpc64: convert to dynamic percpu allocator
  sparc64: use embedding percpu first chunk allocator
  percpu: kill lpage first chunk allocator
  x86,percpu: use embedding for 64bit NUMA and page for 32bit NUMA
  percpu: update embedding first chunk allocator to handle sparse units
  percpu: use group information to allocate vmap areas sparsely
  vmalloc: implement pcpu_get_vm_areas()
  vmalloc: separate out insert_vmalloc_vm()
  percpu: add chunk->base_addr
  percpu: add pcpu_unit_offsets[]
  percpu: introduce pcpu_alloc_info and pcpu_group_info
  percpu: move pcpu_lpage_build_unit_map() and pcpul_lpage_dump_cfg() upward
  percpu: add @align to pcpu_fc_alloc_fn_t
  percpu: make @dyn_size mandatory for pcpu_setup_first_chunk()
  percpu: drop @static_size from first chunk allocators
  percpu: generalize first chunk allocator selection
  percpu: build first chunk allocators selectively
  percpu: rename 4k first chunk allocator to page
  percpu: improve boot messages
  percpu: fix pcpu_reclaim() locking
  ...

Fix trivial conflict as by Tejun Heo in kernel/sched.c
2009-09-15 09:39:44 -07:00
Jens Axboe
03ba3782e8 writeback: switch to per-bdi threads for flushing data
This gets rid of pdflush for bdi writeout and kupdated style cleaning.
pdflush writeout suffers from lack of locality and also requires more
threads to handle the same workload, since it has to work in a
non-blocking fashion against each queue. This also introduces lumpy
behaviour and potential request starvation, since pdflush can be starved
for queue access if others are accessing it. A sample ffsb workload that
does random writes to files is about 8% faster here on a simple SATA drive
during the benchmark phase. File layout also seems a LOT more smooth in
vmstat:

 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 0  1      0 608848   2652 375372    0    0     0 71024  604    24  1 10 48 42
 0  1      0 549644   2712 433736    0    0     0 60692  505    27  1  8 48 44
 1  0      0 476928   2784 505192    0    0     4 29540  553    24  0  9 53 37
 0  1      0 457972   2808 524008    0    0     0 54876  331    16  0  4 38 58
 0  1      0 366128   2928 614284    0    0     4 92168  710    58  0 13 53 34
 0  1      0 295092   3000 684140    0    0     0 62924  572    23  0  9 53 37
 0  1      0 236592   3064 741704    0    0     4 58256  523    17  0  8 48 44
 0  1      0 165608   3132 811464    0    0     0 57460  560    21  0  8 54 38
 0  1      0 102952   3200 873164    0    0     4 74748  540    29  1 10 48 41
 0  1      0  48604   3252 926472    0    0     0 53248  469    29  0  7 47 45

where vanilla tends to fluctuate a lot in the creation phase:

 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 1  1      0 678716   5792 303380    0    0     0 74064  565    50  1 11 52 36
 1  0      0 662488   5864 319396    0    0     4   352  302   329  0  2 47 51
 0  1      0 599312   5924 381468    0    0     0 78164  516    55  0  9 51 40
 0  1      0 519952   6008 459516    0    0     4 78156  622    56  1 11 52 37
 1  1      0 436640   6092 541632    0    0     0 82244  622    54  0 11 48 41
 0  1      0 436640   6092 541660    0    0     0     8  152    39  0  0 51 49
 0  1      0 332224   6200 644252    0    0     4 102800  728    46  1 13 49 36
 1  0      0 274492   6260 701056    0    0     4 12328  459    49  0  7 50 43
 0  1      0 211220   6324 763356    0    0     0 106940  515    37  1 10 51 39
 1  0      0 160412   6376 813468    0    0     0  8224  415    43  0  6 49 45
 1  1      0  85980   6452 886556    0    0     4 113516  575    39  1 11 54 34
 0  2      0  85968   6452 886620    0    0     0  1640  158   211  0  0 46 54

A 10 disk test with btrfs performs 26% faster with per-bdi flushing. A
SSD based writeback test on XFS performs over 20% better as well, with
the throughput being very stable around 1GB/sec, where pdflush only
manages 750MB/sec and fluctuates wildly while doing so. Random buffered
writes to many files behave a lot better as well, as does random mmap'ed
writes.

A separate thread is added to sync the super blocks. In the long term,
adding sync_supers_bdi() functionality could get rid of this thread again.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-11 09:20:25 +02:00
Jens Axboe
66f3b8e2e1 writeback: move dirty inodes from super_block to backing_dev_info
This is a first step at introducing per-bdi flusher threads. We should
have no change in behaviour, although sb_has_dirty_inodes() is now
ridiculously expensive, as there's no easy way to answer that question.
Not a huge problem, since it'll be deleted in subsequent patches.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-11 09:20:25 +02:00
Tejun Heo
384be2b18a Merge branch 'percpu-for-linus' into percpu-for-next
Conflicts:
	arch/sparc/kernel/smp_64.c
	arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_counter.c
	arch/x86/kernel/setup_percpu.c
	drivers/cpufreq/cpufreq_ondemand.c
	mm/percpu.c

Conflicts in core and arch percpu codes are mostly from commit
ed78e1e078dd44249f88b1dd8c76dafb39567161 which substituted many
num_possible_cpus() with nr_cpu_ids.  As for-next branch has moved all
the first chunk allocators into mm/percpu.c, the changes are moved
from arch code to mm/percpu.c.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
2009-08-14 14:45:31 +09:00
Jens Axboe
8aa7e847d8 Fix congestion_wait() sync/async vs read/write confusion
Commit 1faa16d228 accidentally broke
the bdi congestion wait queue logic, causing us to wait on congestion
for WRITE (== 1) when we really wanted BLK_RW_ASYNC (== 0) instead.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-07-10 20:31:53 +02:00
Tejun Heo
c43768cbb7 Merge branch 'master' into for-next
Pull linus#master to merge PER_CPU_DEF_ATTRIBUTES and alpha build fix
changes.  As alpha in percpu tree uses 'weak' attribute instead of
inline assembly, there's no need for __used attribute.

Conflicts:
	arch/alpha/include/asm/percpu.h
	arch/mn10300/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
	include/linux/percpu-defs.h
2009-07-04 07:13:18 +09:00
Richard Kennedy
d7831a0bdf mm: prevent balance_dirty_pages() from doing too much work
balance_dirty_pages can overreact and move all of the dirty pages to
writeback unnecessarily.

balance_dirty_pages makes its decision to throttle based on the number of
dirty plus writeback pages that are over the calculated limit,so it will
continue to move pages even when there are plenty of pages in writeback
and less than the threshold still dirty.

This allows it to overshoot its limits and move all the dirty pages to
writeback while waiting for the drives to catch up and empty the writeback
list.

A simple fio test easily demonstrates this problem.

fio --name=f1 --directory=/disk1 --size=2G -rw=write --name=f2 --directory=/disk2 --size=1G --rw=write --startdelay=10

This is the simplest fix I could find, but I'm not entirely sure that it
alone will be enough for all cases.  But it certainly is an improvement on
my desktop machine writing to 2 disks.

Do we need something more for machines with large arrays where
bdi_threshold * number_of_drives is greater than the dirty_ratio ?

Signed-off-by: Richard Kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-06-30 18:56:01 -07:00
Tejun Heo
245b2e70ea percpu: clean up percpu variable definitions
Percpu variable definition is about to be updated such that all percpu
symbols including the static ones must be unique.  Update percpu
variable definitions accordingly.

* as,cfq: rename ioc_count uniquely

* cpufreq: rename cpu_dbs_info uniquely

* xen: move nesting_count out of xen_evtchn_do_upcall() and rename it

* mm: move ratelimits out of balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr() and
  rename it

* ipv4,6: rename cookie_scratch uniquely

* x86 perf_counter: rename prev_left to pmc_prev_left, irq_entry to
  pmc_irq_entry and nmi_entry to pmc_nmi_entry

* perf_counter: rename disable_count to perf_disable_count

* ftrace: rename test_event_disable to ftrace_test_event_disable

* kmemleak: rename test_pointer to kmemleak_test_pointer

* mce: rename next_interval to mce_next_interval

[ Impact: percpu usage cleanups, no duplicate static percpu var names ]

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xensource.com>
Cc: linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>
Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
Cc: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
2009-06-24 15:13:48 +09:00
H Hartley Sweeten
dcf975d585 mm/page-writeback.c: dirty limit type should be unsigned long
get_dirty_limits() calls clip_bdi_dirty_limit() and task_dirty_limit()
with variable pbdi_dirty as one of the arguments.  This variable is an
unsigned long * but both functions expect it to be a long *.  This causes
the following sparse warnings:

  warning: incorrect type in argument 3 (different signedness)
     expected long *pbdi_dirty
     got unsigned long *pbdi_dirty
  warning: incorrect type in argument 2 (different signedness)
     expected long *pdirty
     got unsigned long *pbdi_dirty

Fix the warnings by changing the long * to unsigned long * in both
functions.

Signed-off-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-06-16 19:47:31 -07:00