Commit Graph

202 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Jan Kara
697e6fed9f writeback: Remove outdated comment
The comment is hopelessly outdated and misplaced. We no longer have 'bdi'
part of writeback work, the comment about blockdev super is outdated,
comment about throttling as well. Information about list handling is in
more detail at queue_io(). So just move the bit about older_than_this to
close to move_expired_inodes() and remove the rest.

Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-03-21 15:27:08 +08:00
Jan Kara
f469ec9c5b fs: Remove bogus wait in write_inode_now()
inode_sync_wait() in write_inode_now() is just bogus. That function waits for
I_SYNC bit to be cleared but writeback_single_inode() clears the bit on return
so the wait is effectivelly a nop unless someone else submits the inode for
writeback again. All the waiting write_inode_now() needs is achieved by using
WB_SYNC_ALL writeback mode.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-03-21 15:26:47 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
15eb77a07c writeback: fix NULL bdi->dev in trace writeback_single_inode
bdi_prune_sb() resets sb->s_bdi to default_backing_dev_info when the
tearing down the original bdi. Fix trace_writeback_single_inode to
use sb->s_bdi=default_backing_dev_info rather than bdi->dev=NULL for a
teared down bdi.

Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Reported-by: Rabin Vincent <rabin@rab.in>
Tested-by: Rabin Vincent <rabin@rab.in>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-02-01 16:53:40 +08:00
Linus Torvalds
001a541ea9 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: move MIN_WRITEBACK_PAGES to fs-writeback.c
  writeback: balanced_rate cannot exceed write bandwidth
  writeback: do strict bdi dirty_exceeded
  writeback: avoid tiny dirty poll intervals
  writeback: max, min and target dirty pause time
  writeback: dirty ratelimit - think time compensation
  btrfs: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writes
  writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirty
  writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writes
  writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasks
  writeback: Include all dirty inodes in background writeback
2012-01-10 16:59:59 -08:00
Linus Torvalds
eb59c505f8 Merge branch 'pm-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/linux-pm
* 'pm-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/linux-pm: (76 commits)
  PM / Hibernate: Implement compat_ioctl for /dev/snapshot
  PM / Freezer: fix return value of freezable_schedule_timeout_killable()
  PM / shmobile: Allow the A4R domain to be turned off at run time
  PM / input / touchscreen: Make st1232 use device PM QoS constraints
  PM / QoS: Introduce dev_pm_qos_add_ancestor_request()
  PM / shmobile: Remove the stay_on flag from SH7372's PM domains
  PM / shmobile: Don't include SH7372's INTCS in syscore suspend/resume
  PM / shmobile: Add support for the sh7372 A4S power domain / sleep mode
  PM: Drop generic_subsys_pm_ops
  PM / Sleep: Remove forward-only callbacks from AMBA bus type
  PM / Sleep: Remove forward-only callbacks from platform bus type
  PM: Run the driver callback directly if the subsystem one is not there
  PM / Sleep: Make pm_op() and pm_noirq_op() return callback pointers
  PM/Devfreq: Add Exynos4-bus device DVFS driver for Exynos4210/4212/4412.
  PM / Sleep: Merge internal functions in generic_ops.c
  PM / Sleep: Simplify generic system suspend callbacks
  PM / Hibernate: Remove deprecated hibernation snapshot ioctls
  PM / Sleep: Fix freezer failures due to racy usermodehelper_is_disabled()
  ARM: S3C64XX: Implement basic power domain support
  PM / shmobile: Use common always on power domain governor
  ...

Fix up trivial conflict in fs/xfs/xfs_buf.c due to removal of unused
XBT_FORCE_SLEEP bit
2012-01-08 13:10:57 -08:00
Wu Fengguang
bc31b86a59 writeback: move MIN_WRITEBACK_PAGES to fs-writeback.c
Fix compile error

 fs/fs-writeback.c:515:33: error: ‘PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT’ undeclared (first use in this function)

Reported-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-01-08 10:35:19 +08:00
Al Viro
ff01bb4832 fs: move code out of buffer.c
Move invalidate_bdev, block_sync_page into fs/block_dev.c.  Export
kill_bdev as well, so brd doesn't have to open code it.  Reduce
buffer_head.h requirement accordingly.

Removed a rather large comment from invalidate_bdev, as it looked a bit
obsolete to bother moving.  The small comment replacing it says enough.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2012-01-03 22:54:07 -05:00
Rafael J. Wysocki
b7ba68c4a0 Merge branch 'pm-sleep' into pm-for-linus
* pm-sleep: (51 commits)
  PM: Drop generic_subsys_pm_ops
  PM / Sleep: Remove forward-only callbacks from AMBA bus type
  PM / Sleep: Remove forward-only callbacks from platform bus type
  PM: Run the driver callback directly if the subsystem one is not there
  PM / Sleep: Make pm_op() and pm_noirq_op() return callback pointers
  PM / Sleep: Merge internal functions in generic_ops.c
  PM / Sleep: Simplify generic system suspend callbacks
  PM / Hibernate: Remove deprecated hibernation snapshot ioctls
  PM / Sleep: Fix freezer failures due to racy usermodehelper_is_disabled()
  PM / Sleep: Recommend [un]lock_system_sleep() over using pm_mutex directly
  PM / Sleep: Replace mutex_[un]lock(&pm_mutex) with [un]lock_system_sleep()
  PM / Sleep: Make [un]lock_system_sleep() generic
  PM / Sleep: Use the freezer_count() functions in [un]lock_system_sleep() APIs
  PM / Freezer: Remove the "userspace only" constraint from freezer[_do_not]_count()
  PM / Hibernate: Replace unintuitive 'if' condition in kernel/power/user.c with 'else'
  Freezer / sunrpc / NFS: don't allow TASK_KILLABLE sleeps to block the freezer
  PM / Sleep: Unify diagnostic messages from device suspend/resume
  ACPI / PM: Do not save/restore NVS on Asus K54C/K54HR
  PM / Hibernate: Remove deprecated hibernation test modes
  PM / Hibernate: Thaw processes in SNAPSHOT_CREATE_IMAGE ioctl test path
  ...

Conflicts:
	kernel/kmod.c
2011-12-25 23:42:20 +01:00
Rafael J. Wysocki
b00f4dc5ff Merge branch 'master' into pm-sleep
* master: (848 commits)
  SELinux: Fix RCU deref check warning in sel_netport_insert()
  binary_sysctl(): fix memory leak
  mm/vmalloc.c: remove static declaration of va from __get_vm_area_node
  ipmi_watchdog: restore settings when BMC reset
  oom: fix integer overflow of points in oom_badness
  memcg: keep root group unchanged if creation fails
  nilfs2: potential integer overflow in nilfs_ioctl_clean_segments()
  nilfs2: unbreak compat ioctl
  cpusets: stall when updating mems_allowed for mempolicy or disjoint nodemask
  evm: prevent racing during tfm allocation
  evm: key must be set once during initialization
  mmc: vub300: fix type of firmware_rom_wait_states module parameter
  Revert "mmc: enable runtime PM by default"
  mmc: sdhci: remove "state" argument from sdhci_suspend_host
  x86, dumpstack: Fix code bytes breakage due to missing KERN_CONT
  IB/qib: Correct sense on freectxts increment and decrement
  RDMA/cma: Verify private data length
  cgroups: fix a css_set not found bug in cgroup_attach_proc
  oprofile: Fix uninitialized memory access when writing to writing to oprofilefs
  Revert "xen/pv-on-hvm kexec: add xs_reset_watches to shutdown watches from old kernel"
  ...

Conflicts:
	kernel/cgroup_freezer.c
2011-12-21 21:59:45 +01:00
Jan Kara
1bc36b6426 writeback: Include all dirty inodes in background writeback
Current livelock avoidance code makes background work to include only inodes
that were dirtied before background writeback has started. However background
writeback can be running for a long time and thus excluding newly dirtied
inodes can eventually exclude significant portion of dirty inodes making
background writeback inefficient. Since background writeback avoids livelocking
the flusher thread by yielding to any other work, there is no real reason why
background work should not include all dirty inodes so change the logic in
wb_writeback().

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:18 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
b3bba872dd writeback: show writeback reason with __print_symbolic
This makes the binary trace understandable by trace-cmd.

CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
CC: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com>
CC: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:17 +08:00
Marcos Paulo de Souza
786228ab30 writeback: Fix issue on make htmldocs
Document the @reason parameter to make "make htmldocs" happy.

Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Marcos Paulo de Souza <marcos.mage@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-29 15:50:28 +08:00
Tejun Heo
8a32c441c1 freezer: implement and use kthread_freezable_should_stop()
Writeback and thinkpad_acpi have been using thaw_process() to prevent
deadlock between the freezer and kthread_stop(); unfortunately, this
is inherently racy - nothing prevents freezing from happening between
thaw_process() and kthread_stop().

This patch implements kthread_freezable_should_stop() which enters
refrigerator if necessary but is guaranteed to return if
kthread_stop() is invoked.  Both thaw_process() users are converted to
use the new function.

Note that this deadlock condition exists for many of freezable
kthreads.  They need to be converted to use the new should_stop or
freezable workqueue.

Tested with synthetic test case.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <ibm-acpi@hmh.eng.br>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
2011-11-21 12:32:23 -08:00
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
Curt Wohlgemuth
ad4e38dd6a writeback: send work item to queue_io, move_expired_inodes
Instead of sending ->older_than_this to queue_io() and
move_expired_inodes(), send the entire wb_writeback_work
structure.  There are other fields of a work item that are
useful in these routines and in tracepoints.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31 00:33:27 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
b00949aa2d writeback: per-bdi background threshold
One thing puzzled me is that in JBOD case, the per-disk writeout
performance is smaller than the corresponding single-disk case even
when they have comparable bdi_thresh. Tracing shows find that in single
disk case, bdi_writeback is always kept high while in JBOD case, it
could drop low from time to time and correspondingly bdi_reclaimable
could sometimes rush high.

The fix is to watch bdi_reclaimable and kick background writeback as
soon as it goes high. This resembles the global background threshold
but in per-bdi manner. The trick is, as long as bdi_reclaimable does
not go high, bdi_writeback naturally won't go low because
bdi_reclaimable+bdi_writeback ~= bdi_thresh.

With less fluctuated writeback pages, JBOD performance is observed to
increase noticeably in various cases.

vmstat:nr_written values before/after patch:

  3.1.0-rc4-wo-underrun+      3.1.0-rc4-bgthresh3+  
------------------------  ------------------------  
               125596480       +25.9%    158179363  JBOD-10HDD-16G/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                61790815      +110.4%    130032231  JBOD-10HDD-16G/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                58853546        -0.1%     58823828  JBOD-10HDD-16G/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
               110159811       +24.7%    137355377  JBOD-10HDD-16G/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                69544762       +10.8%     77080047  JBOD-10HDD-16G/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                50644862        +0.5%     50890006  JBOD-10HDD-16G/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                42677090       +28.0%     54643527  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                47491324       +13.3%     53785605  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                52548986        +0.9%     53001031  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                26783091       +36.8%     36650248  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                35526347       +14.0%     40492312  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                44670723        -1.1%     44177606  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
               127996037       +22.4%    156719990  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                57518856        +3.8%     59677625  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                51919909       +12.2%     58269894  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                86410514       +79.0%    154660433  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                40132519       +38.6%     55617893  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                48423248        +7.5%     52042927  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
               206041046       +44.1%    296846536  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=4G/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-4096M:10-X
                72312903       -19.4%     58272885  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=4G/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-4096M:10-X
                50635672        -0.5%     50384787  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=4G/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-4096M:10-X
                68308534      +115.7%    147324758  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                57882933       +14.5%     66269621  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                52183472       +12.8%     58855181  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                53788956       +94.2%    104460352  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                44493342       +35.5%     60298210  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                42641209       +18.9%     50681038  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:58 +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
0e995816f4 don't busy retry the inode on failed grab_super_passive()
This fixes a soft lockup on conditions

a) the flusher is working on a work by __bdi_start_writeback(), while

b) someone else calls writeback_inodes_sb*() or sync_inodes_sb(), which
   grab sb->s_umount and enqueue a new work for the flusher to execute

The s_umount grabbed by (b) will fail the grab_super_passive() in (a).
Then if the inode is requeued, wb_writeback() will busy retry on it.
As a result, wb_writeback() loops for ever without releasing
wb->list_lock, which further blocks other tasks.

Fix the busy loop by redirtying the inode. This may undesirably delay
the writeback of the inode, however most likely it will be picked up
soon by the queued work by writeback_inodes_sb*(), sync_inodes_sb() or
even writeback_inodes_wb().

bug url: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-fsdevel/msg47292.html

Reported-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Tested-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-31 22:52:08 +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
fcc5c22218 writeback: don't busy retry writeback on new/freeing inodes
Fix a system hang bug introduced by commit b7a2441f99 ("writeback:
remove writeback_control.more_io") and e8dfc3058 ("writeback: elevate
queue_io() into wb_writeback()") easily reproducible with high memory
pressure and lots of file creation/deletions, for example, a kernel
build in limited memory.

It hangs when some inode is in the I_NEW, I_FREEING or I_WILL_FREE 
state, the flusher will get stuck busy retrying that inode, never
releasing wb->list_lock. The lock in turn blocks all kinds of other
tasks when they are trying to grab it.

As put by Jan, it's a safe change regarding data integrity. I_FREEING or
I_WILL_FREE inodes are written back by iput_final() and it is reclaim
code that is responsible for eventually removing them. So writeback code
can safely ignore them. I_NEW inodes should move out of this state when
they are fully set up and in the writeback round following that, we will
consider them for writeback. So the change makes sense.                                                         

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> 
Reported-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Tested-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-24 10:46:51 +08:00
Dave Chinner
12ad3ab661 superblock: move pin_sb_for_writeback() to fs/super.c
The per-sb shrinker has the same requirement as the writeback
threads of ensuring that the superblock is usable and pinned for the
time it takes to run the work. Both need to take a passive reference
to the sb, take a read lock on the s_umount lock and then only
continue if an unmount is not in progress.

pin_sb_for_writeback() does this exactly, so move it to fs/super.c
and rename it to grab_super_passive() and exporting it via
fs/internal.h for all the VFS code to be able to use.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2011-07-20 01:44:38 -04:00
Wu Fengguang
1a12d8bd7b writeback: scale IO chunk size up to half device bandwidth
Originally, MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES was hard-coded to 1024 because of a
concern of not holding I_SYNC for too long.  (At least, that was the
comment previously.)  This doesn't make sense now because the only
time we wait for I_SYNC is if we are calling sync or fsync, and in
that case we need to write out all of the data anyway.  Previously
there may have been other code paths that waited on I_SYNC, but not
any more.					    -- Theodore Ts'o

So remove the MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES constraint. The writeback pages
will adapt to as large as the storage device can write within 500ms.

XFS is observed to do IO completions in a batch, and the batch size is
equal to the write chunk size. To avoid dirty pages to suddenly drop
out of balance_dirty_pages()'s dirty control scope and create large
fluctuations, the chunk size is also limited to half the control scope.

The balance_dirty_pages() control scrope is

	[(background_thresh + dirty_thresh) / 2, dirty_thresh]

which is by default [15%, 20%] of global dirty pages, whose range size
is dirty_thresh / DIRTY_FULL_SCOPE.

The adpative write chunk size will be rounded to the nearest 4MB
boundary.

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13930

CC: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
CC: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09 22:09:03 -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
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
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
e84d0a4f8e writeback: trace event writeback_queue_io
Note that it adds a little overheads to account the moved/enqueued
inodes from b_dirty to b_io. The "moved" accounting may be later used to
limit the number of inodes that can be moved in one shot, in order to
keep spinlock hold time under control.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:23 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
251d6a471c writeback: trace event writeback_single_inode
It is valuable to know how the dirty inodes are iterated and their IO size.

"writeback_single_inode: bdi 8:0: ino=134246746 state=I_DIRTY_SYNC|I_SYNC age=414 index=0 to_write=1024 wrote=0"

- "state" reflects inode->i_state at the end of writeback_single_inode()
- "index" reflects mapping->writeback_index after the ->writepages() call
- "to_write" is the wbc->nr_to_write at entrance of writeback_single_inode()
- "wrote" is the number of pages actually written

v2: add trace event writeback_single_inode_requeue as proposed by Dave.

CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:23 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
b7a2441f99 writeback: remove writeback_control.more_io
When wbc.more_io was first introduced, it indicates whether there are
at least one superblock whose s_more_io contains more IO work. Now with
the per-bdi writeback, it can be replaced with a simple b_more_io test.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:23 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
e185dda89d writeback: avoid extra sync work at enqueue time
This removes writeback_control.wb_start and does more straightforward
sync livelock prevention by setting .older_than_this to prevent extra
inodes from being enqueued in the first place.

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
e8dfc30582 writeback: elevate queue_io() into wb_writeback()
Code refactor for more logical code layout.
No behavior change.

- remove the mis-named __writeback_inodes_sb()

- wb_writeback()/writeback_inodes_wb() will decide when to queue_io()
  before calling __writeback_inodes_wb()

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:21 +08:00
Christoph Hellwig
f758eeabeb writeback: split inode_wb_list_lock into bdi_writeback.list_lock
Split the global inode_wb_list_lock into a per-bdi_writeback list_lock,
as it's currently the most contended lock in the system for metadata
heavy workloads.  It won't help for single-filesystem workloads for
which we'll need the I/O-less balance_dirty_pages, but at least we
can dedicate a cpu to spinning on each bdi now for larger systems.

Based on earlier patches from Nick Piggin and Dave Chinner.

It reduces lock contentions to 1/4 in this test case:
10 HDD JBOD, 100 dd on each disk, XFS, 6GB ram

lock_stat version 0.3
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                              class name    con-bounces    contentions   waittime-min   waittime-max waittime-total    acq-bounces   acquisitions   holdtime-min   holdtime-max holdtime-total
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vanilla 2.6.39-rc3:
                      inode_wb_list_lock:         42590          44433           0.12         147.74      144127.35         252274         886792           0.08         121.34      917211.23
                      ------------------
                      inode_wb_list_lock              2          [<ffffffff81165da5>] bdev_inode_switch_bdi+0x29/0x85
                      inode_wb_list_lock             34          [<ffffffff8115bd0b>] inode_wb_list_del+0x22/0x49
                      inode_wb_list_lock          12893          [<ffffffff8115bb53>] __mark_inode_dirty+0x170/0x1d0
                      inode_wb_list_lock          10702          [<ffffffff8115afef>] writeback_single_inode+0x16d/0x20a
                      ------------------
                      inode_wb_list_lock              2          [<ffffffff81165da5>] bdev_inode_switch_bdi+0x29/0x85
                      inode_wb_list_lock             19          [<ffffffff8115bd0b>] inode_wb_list_del+0x22/0x49
                      inode_wb_list_lock           5550          [<ffffffff8115bb53>] __mark_inode_dirty+0x170/0x1d0
                      inode_wb_list_lock           8511          [<ffffffff8115b4ad>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x10f/0x157

2.6.39-rc3 + patch:
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock:         11383          11657           0.14         151.69       40429.51          90825         527918           0.11         145.90      556843.37
                ------------------------
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock             10          [<ffffffff8115b189>] inode_wb_list_del+0x5f/0x86
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           1493          [<ffffffff8115b1ed>] writeback_inodes_wb+0x3d/0x150
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           3652          [<ffffffff8115a8e9>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x123/0x16f
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           1412          [<ffffffff8115a38e>] writeback_single_inode+0x17f/0x223
                ------------------------
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock              3          [<ffffffff8110b5af>] bdi_lock_two+0x46/0x4b
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock              6          [<ffffffff8115b189>] inode_wb_list_del+0x5f/0x86
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           2061          [<ffffffff8115af97>] __mark_inode_dirty+0x173/0x1cf
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           2629          [<ffffffff8115a8e9>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x123/0x16f

hughd@google.com: fix recursive lock when bdi_lock_two() is called with new the same as old
akpm@linux-foundation.org: cleanup bdev_inode_switch_bdi() comment

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:21 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
424b351fe1 writeback: refill b_io iff empty
There is no point to carry different refill policies between for_kupdate
and other type of works. Use a consistent "refill b_io iff empty" policy
which can guarantee fairness in an easy to understand way.

A b_io refill will setup a _fixed_ work set with all currently eligible
inodes and start a new round of walk through b_io. The "fixed" work set
means no new inodes will be added to the work set during the walk.
Only when a complete walk over b_io is done, new inodes that are
eligible at the time will be enqueued and the walk be started over.

This procedure provides fairness among the inodes because it guarantees
each inode to be synced once and only once at each round. So all inodes
will be free from starvations.

This change relies on wb_writeback() to keep retrying as long as we made
some progress on cleaning some pages and/or inodes. Without that ability,
the old logic on background works relies on aggressively queuing all
eligible inodes into b_io at every time. But that's not a guarantee.

The below test script completes a slightly faster now:

             2.6.39-rc3	  2.6.39-rc3-dyn-expire+
------------------------------------------------
all elapsed     256.043      252.367
stddev           24.381       12.530

tar elapsed      30.097       28.808
dd  elapsed      13.214       11.782

	#!/bin/zsh

	cp /c/linux-2.6.38.3.tar.bz2 /dev/shm/

	umount /dev/sda7
	mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sda7
	mount /dev/sda7 /fs

	echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

	tic=$(cat /proc/uptime|cut -d' ' -f2)

	cd /fs
	time tar jxf /dev/shm/linux-2.6.38.3.tar.bz2 &
	time dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero bs=1M count=1000 &

	wait
	sync
	tac=$(cat /proc/uptime|cut -d' ' -f2)
	echo elapsed: $((tac - tic))

It maintains roughly the same small vs. large file writeout shares, and
offers large files better chances to be written in nice 4M chunks.

Analyzes from Dave Chinner in great details:

Let's say we have lots of inodes with 100 dirty pages being created,
and one large writeback going on. We expire 8 new inodes for every
1024 pages we write back.

With the old code, we do:

	b_more_io (large inode) -> b_io (1l)
	8 newly expired inodes -> b_io (1l, 8s)

	writeback  large inode 1024 pages -> b_more_io

	b_more_io (large inode) -> b_io (8s, 1l)
	8 newly expired inodes -> b_io (8s, 1l, 8s)

	writeback  8 small inodes 800 pages
		   1 large inode 224 pages -> b_more_io

	b_more_io (large inode) -> b_io (8s, 1l)
	8 newly expired inodes -> b_io (8s, 1l, 8s)
	.....

Your new code:

	b_more_io (large inode) -> b_io (1l)
	8 newly expired inodes -> b_io (1l, 8s)

	writeback  large inode 1024 pages -> b_more_io
	(b_io == 8s)
	writeback  8 small inodes 800 pages

	b_io empty: (1800 pages written)
		b_more_io (large inode) -> b_io (1l)
		14 newly expired inodes -> b_io (1l, 14s)

	writeback  large inode 1024 pages -> b_more_io
	(b_io == 14s)
	writeback  10 small inodes 1000 pages
		   1 small inode 24 pages -> b_more_io (1l, 1s(24))
	writeback  5 small inodes 500 pages
	b_io empty: (2548 pages written)
		b_more_io (large inode) -> b_io (1l, 1s(24))
		20 newly expired inodes -> b_io (1l, 1s(24), 20s)
	......

Rough progression of pages written at b_io refill:

Old code:

	total	large file	% of writeback
	1024	224		21.9% (fixed)

New code:
	total	large file	% of writeback
	1800	1024		~55%
	2550	1024		~40%
	3050	1024		~33%
	3500	1024		~29%
	3950	1024		~26%
	4250	1024		~24%
	4500	1024		~22.7%
	4700	1024		~21.7%
	4800	1024		~21.3%
	4800	1024		~21.3%
	(pretty much steady state from here)

Ok, so the steady state is reached with a similar percentage of
writeback to the large file as the existing code. Ok, that's good,
but providing some evidence that is doesn't change the shared of
writeback to the large should be in the commit message ;)

The other advantage to this is that we always write 1024 page chunks
to the large file, rather than smaller "whatever remains" chunks.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:21 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
ba9aa8399f writeback: the kupdate expire timestamp should be a moving target
Dynamically compute the dirty expire timestamp at queue_io() time.

writeback_control.older_than_this used to be determined at entrance to
the kupdate writeback work. This _static_ timestamp may go stale if the
kupdate work runs on and on. The flusher may then stuck with some old
busy inodes, never considering newly expired inodes thereafter.

This has two possible problems:

- It is unfair for a large dirty inode to delay (for a long time) the
  writeback of small dirty inodes.

- As time goes by, the large and busy dirty inode may contain only
  _freshly_ dirtied pages. Ignoring newly expired dirty inodes risks
  delaying the expired dirty pages to the end of LRU lists, triggering
  the evil pageout(). Nevertheless this patch merely addresses part
  of the problem.

v2: keep policy changes inside wb_writeback() and keep the
wbc.older_than_this visibility as suggested by Dave.

CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Itaru Kitayama <kitayama@cl.bb4u.ne.jp>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:21 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
e6fb6da2e1 writeback: try more writeback as long as something was written
writeback_inodes_wb()/__writeback_inodes_sb() are not aggressive in that
they only populate possibly a subset of eligible inodes into b_io at
entrance time. When the queued set of inodes are all synced, they just
return, possibly with all queued inode pages written but still
wbc.nr_to_write > 0.

For kupdate and background writeback, there may be more eligible inodes
sitting in b_dirty when the current set of b_io inodes are completed. So
it is necessary to try another round of writeback as long as we made some
progress in this round. When there are no more eligible inodes, no more
inodes will be enqueued in queue_io(), hence nothing could/will be
synced and we may safely bail.

For example, imagine 100 inodes

        i0, i1, i2, ..., i90, i91, i99

At queue_io() time, i90-i99 happen to be expired and moved to s_io for
IO. When finished successfully, if their total size is less than
MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES, nr_to_write will be > 0. Then wb_writeback() will
quit the background work (w/o this patch) while it's still over
background threshold. This will be a fairly normal/frequent case I guess.

Now that we do tagged sync and update inode->dirtied_when after the sync,
this change won't livelock sync(1).  I actually tried to write 1 page
per 1ms with this command

	write-and-fsync -n10000 -S 1000 -c 4096 /fs/test

and do sync(1) at the same time. The sync completes quickly on ext4,
xfs, btrfs.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:20 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
cb9bd1159c writeback: introduce writeback_control.inodes_written
The flusher works on dirty inodes in batches, and may quit prematurely
if the batch of inodes happen to be metadata-only dirtied: in this case
wbc->nr_to_write won't be decreased at all, which stands for "no pages
written" but also mis-interpreted as "no progress".

So introduce writeback_control.inodes_written to count the inodes get
cleaned from VFS POV.  A non-zero value means there are some progress on
writeback, in which case more writeback can be tried.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:20 +08:00
Wu Fengguang
94c3dcbb0b writeback: update dirtied_when for synced inode to prevent livelock
Explicitly update .dirtied_when on synced inodes, so that they are no
longer considered for writeback in the next round.

It can prevent both of the following livelock schemes:

- while true; do echo data >> f; done
- while true; do touch f;        done (in theory)

The exact livelock condition is, during sync(1):

(1) no new inodes are dirtied
(2) an inode being actively dirtied

On (2), the inode will be tagged and synced with .nr_to_write=LONG_MAX.
When finished, it will be redirty_tail()ed because it's still dirty
and (.nr_to_write > 0). redirty_tail() won't update its ->dirtied_when
on condition (1). The sync work will then revisit it on the next
queue_io() and find it eligible again because its old ->dirtied_when
predates the sync work start time.

We'll do more aggressive "keep writeback as long as we wrote something"
logic in wb_writeback(). The "use LONG_MAX .nr_to_write" trick in commit
b9543dac5b ("writeback: avoid livelocking WB_SYNC_ALL writeback") will
no longer be enough to stop sync livelock.

Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08 08:25:20 +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
Christoph Hellwig
aa38572954 fs: pass exact type of data dirties to ->dirty_inode
Tell the filesystem if we just updated timestamp (I_DIRTY_SYNC) or
anything else, so that the filesystem can track internally if it
needs to push out a transaction for fdatasync or not.

This is just the prototype change with no user for it yet.  I plan
to push large XFS changes for the next merge window, and getting
this trivial infrastructure in this window would help a lot to avoid
tree interdependencies.

Also remove incorrect comments that ->dirty_inode can't block.  That
has been changed a long time ago, and many implementations rely on it.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2011-05-27 07:04:40 -04:00
Lucas De Marchi
25985edced Fix common misspellings
Fixes generated by 'codespell' and manually reviewed.

Signed-off-by: Lucas De Marchi <lucas.demarchi@profusion.mobi>
2011-03-31 11:26:23 -03:00
Dave Chinner
0f1b1fd86f fs: pull inode->i_lock up out of writeback_single_inode
First thing we do in writeback_single_inode() is take the i_lock and
the last thing we do is drop it. A caller already holds the i_lock,
so pull the i_lock out of writeback_single_inode() to reduce the
round trips on this lock during inode writeback.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2011-03-24 21:17:51 -04:00
Dave Chinner
a66979abad fs: move i_wb_list out from under inode_lock
Protect the inode writeback list with a new global lock
inode_wb_list_lock and use it to protect the list manipulations and
traversals. This lock replaces the inode_lock as the inodes on the
list can be validity checked while holding the inode->i_lock and
hence the inode_lock is no longer needed to protect the list.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2011-03-24 21:17:51 -04:00
Dave Chinner
55fa6091d8 fs: move i_sb_list out from under inode_lock
Protect the per-sb inode list with a new global lock
inode_sb_list_lock and use it to protect the list manipulations and
traversals. This lock replaces the inode_lock as the inodes on the
list can be validity checked while holding the inode->i_lock and
hence the inode_lock is no longer needed to protect the list.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2011-03-24 21:16:32 -04:00
Dave Chinner
250df6ed27 fs: protect inode->i_state with inode->i_lock
Protect inode state transitions and validity checks with the
inode->i_lock. This enables us to make inode state transitions
independently of the inode_lock and is the first step to peeling
away the inode_lock from the code.

This requires that __iget() is done atomically with i_state checks
during list traversals so that we don't race with another thread
marking the inode I_FREEING between the state check and grabbing the
reference.

Also remove the unlock_new_inode() memory barrier optimisation
required to avoid taking the inode_lock when clearing I_NEW.
Simplify the code by simply taking the inode->i_lock around the
state change and wakeup. Because the wakeup is no longer tricky,
remove the wake_up_inode() function and open code the wakeup where
necessary.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2011-03-24 21:16:31 -04:00
Stefan Hajnoczi
cb9ef8d5e3 fs/fs-writeback.c: fix sync_inodes_sb() return value kernel-doc
The sync_inodes_sb() function does not have a return value.  Remove the
outdated documentation comment.

Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-01-13 17:32:48 -08:00
Andrew Morton
c691b9d983 sync_inode_metadata: fix comment
Use correct function name, remove incorrect apostrophe

Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
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
Jan Kara
b9543dac5b writeback: avoid livelocking WB_SYNC_ALL writeback
When wb_writeback() is called in WB_SYNC_ALL mode, work->nr_to_write is
usually set to LONG_MAX.  The logic in wb_writeback() then calls
__writeback_inodes_sb() with nr_to_write == MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES and we
easily end up with non-positive nr_to_write after the function returns, if
the inode has more than MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES dirty pages at the moment.

When nr_to_write is <= 0 wb_writeback() decides we need another round of
writeback but this is wrong in some cases!  For example when a single
large file is continuously dirtied, we would never finish syncing it
because each pass would be able to write MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES and inode
dirty timestamp never gets updated (as inode is never completely clean).
Thus __writeback_inodes_sb() would write the redirtied inode again and
again.

Fix the issue by setting nr_to_write to LONG_MAX in WB_SYNC_ALL mode.  We
do not need nr_to_write in WB_SYNC_ALL mode anyway since
write_cache_pages() does livelock avoidance using page tagging in
WB_SYNC_ALL mode.

This makes wb_writeback() call __writeback_inodes_sb() only once on
WB_SYNC_ALL.  The latter function won't livelock because it works on

- a finite set of files by doing queue_io() once at the beginning
- a finite set of pages by PAGECACHE_TAG_TOWRITE page tagging

After this patch, program from http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/10/24/154 is no
longer able to stall sync forever.

[fengguang.wu@intel.com: fix locking comment]
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
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
Jan Kara
aa373cf550 writeback: stop background/kupdate works from livelocking other works
Background writeback is easily livelockable in a loop in wb_writeback() by
a process continuously re-dirtying pages (or continuously appending to a
file).  This is in fact intended as the target of background writeback is
to write dirty pages it can find as long as we are over
dirty_background_threshold.

But the above behavior gets inconvenient at times because no other work
queued in the flusher thread's queue gets processed.  In particular, since
e.g.  sync(1) relies on flusher thread to do all the IO for it, sync(1)
can hang forever waiting for flusher thread to do the work.

Generally, when a flusher thread has some work queued, someone submitted
the work to achieve a goal more specific than what background writeback
does.  Moreover by working on the specific work, we also reduce amount of
dirty pages which is exactly the target of background writeout.  So it
makes sense to give specific work a priority over a generic page cleaning.

Thus we interrupt background writeback if there is some other work to do.
We return to the background writeback after completing all the queued
work.

This may delay the writeback of expired inodes for a while, however the
expired inodes will eventually be flushed to disk as long as the other
works won't livelock.

[fengguang.wu@intel.com: update comment]
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>

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
Wu Fengguang
71927e84e0 writeback: trace wakeup event for background writeback
This tracks when balance_dirty_pages() tries to wakeup the flusher thread
for background writeback (if it was not started already).

Suggested-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
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
Jan Kara
6585027a5e writeback: integrated background writeback work
Check whether background writeback is needed after finishing each work.

When bdi flusher thread finishes doing some work check whether any kind of
background writeback needs to be done (either because
dirty_background_ratio is exceeded or because we need to start flushing
old inodes).  If so, just do background write back.

This way, bdi_start_background_writeback() just needs to wake up the
flusher thread.  It will do background writeback as soon as there is no
other work.

This is a preparatory patch for the next patch which stops background
writeback as soon as there is other work to do.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
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
925d169f5b Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mason/btrfs-unstable
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mason/btrfs-unstable: (39 commits)
  Btrfs: deal with errors from updating the tree log
  Btrfs: allow subvol deletion by unprivileged user with -o user_subvol_rm_allowed
  Btrfs: make SNAP_DESTROY async
  Btrfs: add SNAP_CREATE_ASYNC ioctl
  Btrfs: add START_SYNC, WAIT_SYNC ioctls
  Btrfs: async transaction commit
  Btrfs: fix deadlock in btrfs_commit_transaction
  Btrfs: fix lockdep warning on clone ioctl
  Btrfs: fix clone ioctl where range is adjacent to extent
  Btrfs: fix delalloc checks in clone ioctl
  Btrfs: drop unused variable in block_alloc_rsv
  Btrfs: cleanup warnings from gcc 4.6 (nonbugs)
  Btrfs: Fix variables set but not read (bugs found by gcc 4.6)
  Btrfs: Use ERR_CAST helpers
  Btrfs: use memdup_user helpers
  Btrfs: fix raid code for removing missing drives
  Btrfs: Switch the extent buffer rbtree into a radix tree
  Btrfs: restructure try_release_extent_buffer()
  Btrfs: use the flusher threads for delalloc throttling
  Btrfs: tune the chunk allocation to 5% of the FS as metadata
  ...

Fix up trivial conflicts in fs/btrfs/super.c and fs/fs-writeback.c, and
remove use of INIT_RCU_HEAD in fs/btrfs/extent_io.c (that init macro was
useless and removed in commit 5e8067adfd: "rcu head remove init")
2010-10-30 09:05:48 -07:00