linux_dsm_epyc7002/mm
Maxim Patlasov 5a53748568 mm/page-writeback.c: add strictlimit feature
The feature prevents mistrusted filesystems (ie: FUSE mounts created by
unprivileged users) to grow a large number of dirty pages before
throttling.  For such filesystems balance_dirty_pages always check bdi
counters against bdi limits.  I.e.  even if global "nr_dirty" is under
"freerun", it's not allowed to skip bdi checks.  The only use case for now
is fuse: it sets bdi max_ratio to 1% by default and system administrators
are supposed to expect that this limit won't be exceeded.

The feature is on if a BDI is marked by BDI_CAP_STRICTLIMIT flag.  A
filesystem may set the flag when it initializes its BDI.

The problematic scenario comes from the fact that nobody pays attention to
the NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP counter (i.e.  number of pages under fuse
writeback).  The implementation of fuse writeback releases original page
(by calling end_page_writeback) almost immediately.  A fuse request queued
for real processing bears a copy of original page.  Hence, if userspace
fuse daemon doesn't finalize write requests in timely manner, an
aggressive mmap writer can pollute virtually all memory by those temporary
fuse page copies.  They are carefully accounted in NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP, but
nobody cares.

To make further explanations shorter, let me use "NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP
problem" as a shortcut for "a possibility of uncontrolled grow of amount
of RAM consumed by temporary pages allocated by kernel fuse to process
writeback".

The problem was very easy to reproduce.  There is a trivial example
filesystem implementation in fuse userspace distribution: fusexmp_fh.c.  I
added "sleep(1);" to the write methods, then recompiled and mounted it.
Then created a huge file on the mount point and run a simple program which
mmap-ed the file to a memory region, then wrote a data to the region.  An
hour later I observed almost all RAM consumed by fuse writeback.  Since
then some unrelated changes in kernel fuse made it more difficult to
reproduce, but it is still possible now.

Putting this theoretical happens-in-the-lab thing aside, there is another
thing that really hurts real world (FUSE) users.  This is write-through
page cache policy FUSE currently uses.  I.e.  handling write(2), kernel
fuse populates page cache and flushes user data to the server
synchronously.  This is excessively suboptimal.  Pavel Emelyanov's patches
("writeback cache policy") solve the problem, but they also make resolving
NR_WRITEBACK_TEMP problem absolutely necessary.  Otherwise, simply copying
a huge file to a fuse mount would result in memory starvation.  Miklos,
the maintainer of FUSE, believes strictlimit feature the way to go.

And eventually putting FUSE topics aside, there is one more use-case for
strictlimit feature.  Using a slow USB stick (mass storage) in a machine
with huge amount of RAM installed is a well-known pain.  Let's make simple
computations.  Assuming 64GB of RAM installed, existing implementation of
balance_dirty_pages will start throttling only after 9.6GB of RAM becomes
dirty (freerun == 15% of total RAM).  So, the command "cp 9GB_file
/media/my-usb-storage/" may return in a few seconds, but subsequent
"umount /media/my-usb-storage/" will take more than two hours if effective
throughput of the storage is, to say, 1MB/sec.

After inclusion of strictlimit feature, it will be trivial to add a knob
(e.g.  /sys/devices/virtual/bdi/x:y/strictlimit) to enable it on demand.
Manually or via udev rule.  May be I'm wrong, but it seems to be quite a
natural desire to limit the amount of dirty memory for some devices we are
not fully trust (in the sense of sustainable throughput).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix warning in page-writeback.c]
Signed-off-by: Maxim Patlasov <MPatlasov@parallels.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-09-11 15:58:04 -07:00
..
backing-dev.c mm/backing-dev.c: check user buffer length before copying data to the related user buffer 2013-09-11 15:58:03 -07:00
balloon_compaction.c mm: introduce a common interface for balloon pages mobility 2012-12-11 17:22:26 -08:00
bootmem.c mm: kill free_all_bootmem_node() 2013-07-03 16:07:39 -07:00
bounce.c Merge branch 'for-3.10/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block 2013-05-08 10:13:35 -07:00
cleancache.c mm: cleancache: clean up cleancache_enabled 2013-04-30 17:04:01 -07:00
compaction.c mm: compaction: do not compact pgdat for order-0 2013-09-11 15:57:55 -07:00
debug-pagealloc.c mm, x86: Remove debug_pagealloc_enabled 2011-12-06 09:24:07 +01:00
dmapool.c dmapool: make DMAPOOL_DEBUG detect corruption of free marker 2012-12-11 17:22:24 -08:00
fadvise.c teach SYSCALL_DEFINE<n> how to deal with long long/unsigned long long 2013-03-03 22:46:22 -05:00
failslab.c switch debugfs to umode_t 2012-01-03 22:54:56 -05:00
filemap_xip.c lift sb_start_write() out of ->write() 2013-04-09 14:12:56 -04:00
filemap.c direct-io: Handle O_(D)SYNC AIO 2013-09-04 09:23:46 -04:00
fremap.c mm: save soft-dirty bits on file pages 2013-08-13 17:57:48 -07:00
frontswap.c frontswap: fix incorrect zeroing and allocation size for frontswap_map 2013-06-12 16:29:46 -07:00
highmem.c Some nice cleanups, and even a patch my wife did as a "live" demo for 2012-12-20 08:37:05 -08:00
huge_memory.c mm/huge_memory.c: fix potential NULL pointer dereference 2013-09-11 15:57:19 -07:00
hugetlb_cgroup.c cgroup: pass around cgroup_subsys_state instead of cgroup in file methods 2013-08-08 20:11:24 -04:00
hugetlb.c mm: prepare to remove /proc/sys/vm/hugepages_treat_as_movable 2013-09-11 15:57:49 -07:00
hwpoison-inject.c memcg: rename config variables 2012-07-31 18:42:43 -07:00
init-mm.c atomic: use <linux/atomic.h> 2011-07-26 16:49:47 -07:00
internal.h mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock 2013-09-11 15:58:01 -07:00
interval_tree.c mm: add CONFIG_DEBUG_VM_RB build option 2012-10-09 16:22:42 +09:00
Kconfig Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/next' into kvm-ppc-next 2013-08-29 00:41:59 +02:00
Kconfig.debug mm: more intensive memory corruption debugging 2012-01-10 16:30:42 -08:00
kmemcheck.c
kmemleak-test.c
kmemleak.c mm: replace strict_strtoul() with kstrtoul() 2013-09-11 15:57:11 -07:00
ksm.c mm: replace strict_strtoul() with kstrtoul() 2013-09-11 15:57:11 -07:00
maccess.c mm: Map most files to use export.h instead of module.h 2011-10-31 09:20:12 -04:00
madvise.c mm/madvise.c: fix coding-style errors 2013-09-11 15:57:00 -07:00
Makefile zswap: add to mm/ 2013-07-10 18:11:34 -07:00
memblock.c memblock, numa: binary search node id 2013-09-11 15:57:51 -07:00
memcontrol.c kmemcg: don't allocate extra memory for root memcg_cache_params 2013-09-11 15:57:53 -07:00
memory_hotplug.c mm: memory-hotplug: enable memory hotplug to handle hugepage 2013-09-11 15:57:48 -07:00
memory-failure.c mm: soft-offline: use migrate_pages() instead of migrate_huge_page() 2013-09-11 15:57:47 -07:00
memory.c mm: migrate: add hugepage migration code to move_pages() 2013-09-11 15:57:48 -07:00
mempolicy.c mbind: add BUG_ON(!vma) in new_vma_page() 2013-09-11 15:57:50 -07:00
mempool.c mempool: add @gfp_mask to mempool_create_node() 2012-06-25 11:53:47 +02:00
migrate.c mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock 2013-09-11 15:58:01 -07:00
mincore.c swap: make each swap partition have one address_space 2013-02-23 17:50:17 -08:00
mlock.c mm: munlock: manual pte walk in fast path instead of follow_page_mask() 2013-09-11 15:58:01 -07:00
mm_init.c mm: tune vm_committed_as percpu_counter batching size 2013-07-03 16:07:32 -07:00
mmap.c mm: track vma changes with VM_SOFTDIRTY bit 2013-09-11 15:57:56 -07:00
mmu_context.c mm: remove old aio use_mm() comment 2013-05-07 18:38:27 -07:00
mmu_notifier.c treewide: relase -> release 2013-06-28 14:34:33 +02:00
mmzone.c mm: rename page struct field helpers 2013-02-23 17:50:18 -08:00
mprotect.c mm/mprotect.c: coding-style cleanups 2012-12-18 15:02:15 -08:00
mremap.c mm/mremap.c: call pud_free() after fail calling pmd_alloc() 2013-09-11 15:58:03 -07:00
msync.c
nobootmem.c mm: concentrate modification of totalram_pages into the mm core 2013-07-03 16:07:33 -07:00
nommu.c mm: remove free_area_cache 2013-07-10 18:11:34 -07:00
oom_kill.c mm/oom_kill: remove weird use of ERR_PTR()/PTR_ERR(). 2013-07-15 11:25:05 +09:30
page_alloc.c mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock 2013-09-11 15:58:01 -07:00
page_cgroup.c memcontrol: use N_MEMORY instead N_HIGH_MEMORY 2012-12-12 17:38:32 -08:00
page_io.c mm: remove compressed copy from zram in-memory 2013-07-03 16:07:26 -07:00
page_isolation.c mm: memory-hotplug: enable memory hotplug to handle hugepage 2013-09-11 15:57:48 -07:00
page-writeback.c mm/page-writeback.c: add strictlimit feature 2013-09-11 15:58:04 -07:00
pagewalk.c mm/pagewalk.c: walk_page_range should avoid VM_PFNMAP areas 2013-05-24 16:22:53 -07:00
percpu-km.c
percpu-vm.c mm: fix kernel-doc warnings 2012-06-20 14:39:36 -07:00
percpu.c mm, percpu: Make sure percpu_alloc early parameter has an argument 2012-12-02 06:23:04 -08:00
pgtable-generic.c mm: move pgtable related functions to right place 2013-09-11 15:57:30 -07:00
process_vm_access.c Fix: compat_rw_copy_check_uvector() misuse in aio, readv, writev, and security keys 2013-03-12 11:05:45 -07:00
quicklist.c mm: delete various needless include <linux/module.h> 2011-10-31 09:20:11 -04:00
readahead.c readahead: make context readahead more conservative 2013-09-11 15:57:39 -07:00
rmap.c s390/mm: implement software referenced bits 2013-08-29 13:20:11 +02:00
shmem.c shm_mnt is as longterm as it gets, TYVM... 2013-09-03 22:50:27 -04:00
slab_common.c Merge branch 'slab/for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/penberg/linux 2013-07-14 15:14:29 -07:00
slab.c kernel: delete __cpuinit usage from all core kernel files 2013-07-14 19:36:59 -04:00
slab.h memcg: check that kmem_cache has memcg_params before accessing it 2013-08-28 19:26:38 -07:00
slob.c Merge branch 'slab/for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/penberg/linux 2013-07-14 15:14:29 -07:00
slub.c mm: replace strict_strtoul() with kstrtoul() 2013-09-11 15:57:11 -07:00
sparse-vmemmap.c sparse-vmemmap: specify vmemmap population range in bytes 2013-04-29 15:54:35 -07:00
sparse.c mm/sparse: introduce alloc_usemap_and_memmap 2013-09-11 15:58:01 -07:00
swap_state.c swap: avoid read_swap_cache_async() race to deadlock while waiting on discard I/O completion 2013-06-12 16:29:45 -07:00
swap.c mm: fix aio performance regression for database caused by THP 2013-09-11 15:57:55 -07:00
swapfile.c swap: make cluster allocation per-cpu 2013-09-11 15:57:17 -07:00
truncate.c mm: teach truncate_inode_pages_range() to handle non page aligned ranges 2013-05-27 23:32:35 -04:00
util.c swap: clean-up #ifdef in page_mapping() 2013-09-11 15:57:31 -07:00
vmalloc.c mm/vmalloc: use wrapper function get_vm_area_size to caculate size of vm area 2013-09-11 15:58:02 -07:00
vmpressure.c Merge branch 'for-3.12' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/cgroup 2013-09-03 18:25:03 -07:00
vmscan.c mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock 2013-09-11 15:58:01 -07:00
vmstat.c mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock 2013-09-11 15:58:01 -07:00
zbud.c mm/zbud: fix some trivial typos in comments 2013-09-11 15:57:35 -07:00
zswap.c mm/zswap.c: get swapper address_space by using macro 2013-09-11 15:57:08 -07:00