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82 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
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
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
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
846d5a091b writeback: remove .nonblocking and .encountered_congestion
Remove two unused struct writeback_control fields:

	.encountered_congestion	(completely unused)
	.nonblocking		(never set, checked/showed in XFS,NFS/btrfs)

The .for_background check in nfs_write_inode() is also removed btw,
as .for_background implies WB_SYNC_NONE.

Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Proposed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
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
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
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
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
Dave Chinner
67a23c4946 fs: rename inode_lock to inode_hash_lock
All that remains of the inode_lock is protecting the inode hash list
manipulation and traversals. Rename the inode_lock to
inode_hash_lock to reflect it's actual function.

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
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
Chris Mason
3259f8bed2 Add new functions for triggering inode writeback
When btrfs is running low on metadata space, it needs to force delayed
allocation pages to disk.  It currently does this with a suboptimal walk
of a private list of inodes with delayed allocation, and it would be
much better if we used the generic flusher threads.

writeback_inodes_sb_if_idle would be ideal, but it waits for the flusher
thread to start IO on all the dirty pages in the FS before it returns.
This adds variants of writeback_inodes_sb* that allow the caller to
control how many pages get sent down.

Signed-off-by: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
2010-10-29 11:25:29 -04:00
Theodore Ts'o
a107e5a3a4 Merge branch 'next' into upstream-merge
Conflicts:
	fs/ext4/inode.c
	fs/ext4/mballoc.c
	include/trace/events/ext4.h
2010-10-27 23:44:47 -04:00
Eric Sandeen
5b41d92437 ext4: implement writeback livelock avoidance using page tagging
This is analogous to Jan Kara's commit,
f446daaea9
mm: implement writeback livelock avoidance using page tagging

but since we forked write_cache_pages, we need to reimplement
it there (and in ext4_da_writepages, since range_cyclic handling
was moved to there)

If you start a large buffered IO to a file, and then set
fsync after it, you'll find that fsync does not complete
until the other IO stops.

If you continue re-dirtying the file (say, putting dd
with conv=notrunc in a loop), when fsync finally completes
(after all IO is done), it reports via tracing that
it has written many more pages than the file contains;
in other words it has synced and re-synced pages in
the file multiple times.

This then leads to problems with our writeback_index
update, since it advances it by pages written, and
essentially sets writeback_index off the end of the
file...

With the following patch, we only sync as much as was
dirty at the time of the sync.

Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
2010-10-27 21:30:13 -04:00
Linus Torvalds
426e1f5cec Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs-2.6
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs-2.6: (52 commits)
  split invalidate_inodes()
  fs: skip I_FREEING inodes in writeback_sb_inodes
  fs: fold invalidate_list into invalidate_inodes
  fs: do not drop inode_lock in dispose_list
  fs: inode split IO and LRU lists
  fs: switch bdev inode bdi's correctly
  fs: fix buffer invalidation in invalidate_list
  fsnotify: use dget_parent
  smbfs: use dget_parent
  exportfs: use dget_parent
  fs: use RCU read side protection in d_validate
  fs: clean up dentry lru modification
  fs: split __shrink_dcache_sb
  fs: improve DCACHE_REFERENCED usage
  fs: use percpu counter for nr_dentry and nr_dentry_unused
  fs: simplify __d_free
  fs: take dcache_lock inside __d_path
  fs: do not assign default i_ino in new_inode
  fs: introduce a per-cpu last_ino allocator
  new helper: ihold()
  ...
2010-10-26 17:58:44 -07:00
Namhyung Kim
92c09c041f mm: declare some external symbols
Declare 'bdi_pending_list' and 'tag_pages_for_writeback()' to remove
following sparse warnings:

 mm/backing-dev.c:46:1: warning: symbol 'bdi_pending_list' was not declared. Should it be static?
 mm/page-writeback.c:825:6: warning: symbol 'tag_pages_for_writeback' was not declared. Should it be static?

Signed-off-by: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-10-26 16:52:10 -07:00
Nick Piggin
9e38d86ff2 fs: Implement lazy LRU updates for inodes
Convert the inode LRU to use lazy updates to reduce lock and
cacheline traffic.  We avoid moving inodes around in the LRU list
during iget/iput operations so these frequent operations don't need
to access the LRUs. Instead, we defer the refcount checks to
reclaim-time and use a per-inode state flag, I_REFERENCED, to tell
reclaim that iget has touched the inode in the past. This means that
only reclaim should be touching the LRU with any frequency, hence
significantly reducing lock acquisitions and the amount contention
on LRU updates.

This also removes the inode_in_use list, which means we now only
have one list for tracking the inode LRU status. This makes it much
simpler to split out the LRU list operations under it's own lock.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2010-10-25 21:26:09 -04:00
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
Christoph Hellwig
edadfb10ba writeback: split writeback_inodes_wb
The case where we have a superblock doesn't require a loop here as we scan
over all inodes in writeback_sb_inodes. Split it out into a separate helper
to make the code simpler.  This also allows to get rid of the sb member in
struct writeback_control, which was rather out of place there.

Also update the comments in writeback_sb_inodes that explain the handling
of inodes from wrong superblocks.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-07-06 08:54:08 +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
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
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
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
Edward Shishkin
f11c9c5c25 vfs: improve writeback_inodes_wb()
Do not pin/unpin superblock for every inode in writeback_inodes_wb(), pin
it for the whole group of inodes which belong to the same superblock and
call writeback_sb_inodes() handler for them.

Signed-off-by: Edward Shishkin <edward.shishkin@gmail.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2010-03-12 10:03:42 +01:00
Eric Sandeen
17bd55d037 fs-writeback: Add helper function to start writeback if idle
ext4, at least, would like to start pushing on writeback if it starts
to get close to ENOSPC when reserving worst-case blocks for delalloc
writes.  Writing out delalloc data will convert those worst-case
predictions into usually smaller actual usage, freeing up space
before we hit ENOSPC based on this speculation.

Thanks to Jens for the suggestion for the helper function,
& the naming help.

I've made the helper return status on whether writeback was
started even though I don't plan to use it in the ext4 patch;
it seems like it would be potentially useful to test this
in some cases.

Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
2009-12-23 07:57:07 -05:00
Christoph Hellwig
eaff8079d4 kill I_LOCK
After I_SYNC was split from I_LOCK the leftover is always used together with
I_NEW and thus superflous.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2009-12-17 11:03:25 -05:00
Wu Fengguang
b17621fed6 writeback: introduce wbc.for_background
It will lower the flush priority for NFS, and maybe more in future.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-12-03 13:54:25 +01:00
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
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
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
Jan Kara
18f2ee705d vfs: Remove generic_osync_inode() and sync_page_range{_nolock}()
Remove these three functions since nobody uses them anymore.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
2009-09-14 17:08:17 +02:00
Jens Axboe
d0bceac747 writeback: get rid of pdflush completely
It is now unused, so kill it off.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-11 09:20:25 +02:00
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
d8a8559cd7 writeback: get rid of generic_sync_sb_inodes() export
This adds two new exported functions:

- writeback_inodes_sb(), which only attempts to writeback dirty inodes on
  this super_block, for WB_SYNC_NONE writeout.
- sync_inodes_sb(), which writes out all dirty inodes on this super_block
  and also waits for the IO to complete.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-09-11 09:20:25 +02:00
Jan Kara
5cee5815d1 vfs: Make sys_sync() use fsync_super() (version 4)
It is unnecessarily fragile to have two places (fsync_super() and do_sync())
doing data integrity sync of the filesystem. Alter __fsync_super() to
accommodate needs of both callers and use it. So after this patch
__fsync_super() is the only place where we gather all the calls needed to
properly send all data on a filesystem to disk.

Nice bonus is that we get a complete livelock avoidance and write_supers()
is now only used for periodic writeback of superblocks.

sync_blockdevs() introduced a couple of patches ago is gone now.

[build fixes folded]

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2009-06-11 21:36:03 -04:00
Jens Axboe
cd17cbfda0 Revert "mm: add /proc controls for pdflush threads"
This reverts commit fafd688e4c.

Work is progressing to switch away from pdflush as the process backing
for flushing out dirty data. So it seems pointless to add more knobs
to control pdflush threads. The original author of the patch did not
have any specific use cases for adding the knobs, so we can easily
revert this before 2.6.30 to avoid having to maintain this API
forever.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-05-15 11:32:24 +02:00
Peter W Morreale
fafd688e4c mm: add /proc controls for pdflush threads
Add /proc entries to give the admin the ability to control the minimum and
maximum number of pdflush threads.  This allows finer control of pdflush
on both large and small machines.

The rationale is simply one size does not fit all.  Admins on large and/or
small systems may want to tune the min/max pdflush thread count to best
suit their needs.  Right now the min/max is hardcoded to 2/8.  While
probably a fair estimate for smaller machines, large machines with large
numbers of CPUs and large numbers of filesystems/block devices may benefit
from larger numbers of threads working on different block devices.

Even if the background flushing algorithm is radically changed, it is
still likely that multiple threads will be involved and admins would still
desire finer control on the min/max other than to have to recompile the
kernel.

The patch adds '/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_min' and
'/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_max' with r/w permissions.

The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_min is 1 and the maximum value is
the current value of nr_pdflush_threads_max.  This minimum is required
since additional thread creation is performed in a pdflush thread itself.

The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_max is the current value of
nr_pdflush_threads_min and the maximum value can be 1000.

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt is also updated.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment, fix whitespace, use __read_mostly]
Signed-off-by: Peter W Morreale <pmorreale@novell.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-04-07 08:31:03 -07:00
Alexey Dobriyan
704503d836 mm: fix proc_dointvec_userhz_jiffies "breakage"
Addresses http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9838

On i386, HZ=1000, jiffies_to_clock_t() converts time in a somewhat strange
way from the user's point of view:

	# echo 500 >/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
	# cat /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
	499

So, we have 5000 jiffies converted to only 499 clock ticks and reported
back.

TICK_NSEC = 999848
ACTHZ = 256039

Keeping in-kernel variable in units passed from userspace will fix issue
of course, but this probably won't be right for every sysctl.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
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>
2009-04-01 08:59:13 -07:00
Nick Piggin
4f5a99d64c fs: remove WB_SYNC_HOLD
Remove WB_SYNC_HOLD.  The primary motiviation is the design of my
anti-starvation code for fsync.  It requires taking an inode lock over the
sync operation, so we could run into lock ordering problems with multiple
inodes.  It is possible to take a single global lock to solve the ordering
problem, but then that would prevent a future nice implementation of "sync
multiple inodes" based on lock order via inode address.

Seems like a backward step to remove this, but actually it is busted
anyway: we can't use the inode lists for data integrity wait: an inode can
be taken off the dirty lists but still be under writeback.  In order to
satisfy data integrity semantics, we should wait for it to finish
writeback, but if we only search the dirty lists, we'll miss it.

It would be possible to have a "writeback" list, for sys_sync, I suppose.
But why complicate things by prematurely optimise?  For unmounting, we
could avoid the "livelock avoidance" code, which would be easier, but
again premature IMO.

Fixing the existing data integrity problem will come next.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-06 15:59:09 -08:00
David Rientjes
2da02997e0 mm: add dirty_background_bytes and dirty_bytes sysctls
This change introduces two new sysctls to /proc/sys/vm:
dirty_background_bytes and dirty_bytes.

dirty_background_bytes is the counterpart to dirty_background_ratio and
dirty_bytes is the counterpart to dirty_ratio.

With growing memory capacities of individual machines, it's no longer
sufficient to specify dirty thresholds as a percentage of the amount of
dirtyable memory over the entire system.

dirty_background_bytes and dirty_bytes specify quantities of memory, in
bytes, that represent the dirty limits for the entire system.  If either
of these values is set, its value represents the amount of dirty memory
that is needed to commence either background or direct writeback.

When a `bytes' or `ratio' file is written, its counterpart becomes a
function of the written value.  For example, if dirty_bytes is written to
be 8096, 8K of memory is required to commence direct writeback.
dirty_ratio is then functionally equivalent to 8K / the amount of
dirtyable memory:

	dirtyable_memory = free pages + mapped pages + file cache

	dirty_background_bytes = dirty_background_ratio * dirtyable_memory
		-or-
	dirty_background_ratio = dirty_background_bytes / dirtyable_memory

		AND

	dirty_bytes = dirty_ratio * dirtyable_memory
		-or-
	dirty_ratio = dirty_bytes / dirtyable_memory

Only one of dirty_background_bytes and dirty_background_ratio may be
specified at a time, and only one of dirty_bytes and dirty_ratio may be
specified.  When one sysctl is written, the other appears as 0 when read.

The `bytes' files operate on a page size granularity since dirty limits
are compared with ZVC values, which are in page units.

Prior to this change, the minimum dirty_ratio was 5 as implemented by
get_dirty_limits() although /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio would show any user
written value between 0 and 100.  This restriction is maintained, but
dirty_bytes has a lower limit of only one page.

Also prior to this change, the dirty_background_ratio could not equal or
exceed dirty_ratio.  This restriction is maintained in addition to
restricting dirty_background_bytes.  If either background threshold equals
or exceeds that of the dirty threshold, it is implicitly set to half the
dirty threshold.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-06 15:59:03 -08:00
David Rientjes
364aeb2849 mm: change dirty limit type specifiers to unsigned long
The background dirty and dirty limits are better defined with type
specifiers of unsigned long since negative writeback thresholds are not
possible.

These values, as returned by get_dirty_limits(), are normally compared
with ZVC values to determine whether writeback shall commence or be
throttled.  Such page counts cannot be negative, so declaring the page
limits as signed is unnecessary.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-06 15:59:02 -08:00
Aneesh Kumar K.V
17bc6c30cf vfs: Add no_nrwrite_index_update writeback control flag
If no_nrwrite_index_update is set we don't update nr_to_write and
address space writeback_index in write_cache_pages.  This change
enables a file system to skip these updates in write_cache_pages and do
them in the writepages() callback.  This patch will be followed by an
ext4 patch that make use of these new flags.

Signed-off-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
CC: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
2008-10-16 10:09:17 -04:00
Aneesh Kumar K.V
74baaaaec8 vfs: Remove the range_cont writeback mode.
Ext4 was the only user of range_cont writeback mode and ext4 switched
to a different method. So remove the range_cont mode which is not used
in the kernel.

Signed-off-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
CC: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
2008-10-14 09:21:02 -04:00
Linus Torvalds
8d2567a620 Merge branch 'for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4
* 'for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4: (61 commits)
  ext4: Documention update for new ordered mode and delayed allocation
  ext4: do not set extents feature from the kernel
  ext4: Don't allow nonextenst mount option for large filesystem
  ext4: Enable delalloc by default.
  ext4: delayed allocation i_blocks fix for stat
  ext4: fix delalloc i_disksize early update issue
  ext4: Handle page without buffers in ext4_*_writepage()
  ext4: Add ordered mode support for delalloc
  ext4: Invert lock ordering of page_lock and transaction start in delalloc
  mm: Add range_cont mode for writeback
  ext4: delayed allocation ENOSPC handling
  percpu_counter: new function percpu_counter_sum_and_set
  ext4: Add delayed allocation support in data=writeback mode
  vfs: add hooks for ext4's delayed allocation support
  jbd2: Remove data=ordered mode support using jbd buffer heads
  ext4: Use new framework for data=ordered mode in JBD2
  jbd2: Implement data=ordered mode handling via inodes
  vfs: export filemap_fdatawrite_range()
  ext4: Fix lock inversion in ext4_ext_truncate()
  ext4: Invert the locking order of page_lock and transaction start
  ...
2008-07-15 08:36:38 -07:00
Aneesh Kumar K.V
06d6cf6959 mm: Add range_cont mode for writeback
Filesystems like ext4 needs to start a new transaction in
the writepages for block allocation. This happens with delayed
allocation and there is limit to how many credits we can request
from the journal layer. So we call write_cache_pages multiple
times with wbc->nr_to_write set to the maximum possible value
limitted by the max journal credits available.

Add a new mode to writeback that enables us to handle this
behaviour. In the new mode we update the wbc->range_start
to point to the new offset to be written. Next call to
call to write_cache_pages will start writeout from specified
range_start offset. In the new mode we also limit writing
to the specified wbc->range_end.

Signed-off-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Mingming Cao <cmm@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
2008-07-11 19:27:31 -04:00