linux-toradex.git/include/linux/backing-dev.h, branch v3.2.12

writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_work

2011-10-30T16:33:36+00:00

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 
Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimit

2011-10-03T13:08:57+00:00

There are some imperfections in balanced_dirty_ratelimit.

1) large fluctuations

The dirty_rate used for computing balanced_dirty_ratelimit is merely
averaged in the past 200ms (very small comparing to the 3s estimation
period for write_bw), which makes rather dispersed distribution of
balanced_dirty_ratelimit.

It's pretty hard to average out the singular points by increasing the
estimation period. Considering that the averaging technique will
introduce very undesirable time lags, I give it up totally. (btw, the 3s
write_bw averaging time lag is much more acceptable because its impact
is one-way and therefore won't lead to oscillations.)

The more practical way is filtering -- most singular
balanced_dirty_ratelimit points can be filtered out by remembering some
prev_balanced_rate and prev_prev_balanced_rate. However the more
reliable way is to guard balanced_dirty_ratelimit with task_ratelimit.

2) due to truncates and fs redirties, the (write_bw <=> dirty_rate)
match could become unbalanced, which may lead to large systematical
errors in balanced_dirty_ratelimit. The truncates, due to its possibly
bumpy nature, can hardly be compensated smoothly. So let's face it. When
some over-estimated balanced_dirty_ratelimit brings dirty_ratelimit
high, dirty pages will go higher than the setpoint. task_ratelimit will
in turn become lower than dirty_ratelimit.  So if we consider both
balanced_dirty_ratelimit and task_ratelimit and update dirty_ratelimit
only when they are on the same side of dirty_ratelimit, the systematical
errors in balanced_dirty_ratelimit won't be able to bring
dirty_ratelimit far away.

The balanced_dirty_ratelimit estimation may also be inaccurate near
@limit or @freerun, however is less an issue.

3) since we ultimately want to

- keep the fluctuations of task ratelimit as small as possible
- keep the dirty pages around the setpoint as long time as possible

the update policy used for (2) also serves the above goals nicely:
if for some reason the dirty pages are high (task_ratelimit < dirty_ratelimit),
and dirty_ratelimit is low (dirty_ratelimit < balanced_dirty_ratelimit),
there is no point to bring up dirty_ratelimit in a hurry only to hurt
both the above two goals.

So, we make use of task_ratelimit to limit the update of dirty_ratelimit
in two ways:

1) avoid changing dirty rate when it's against the position control target
   (the adjusted rate will slow down the progress of dirty pages going
   back to setpoint).

2) limit the step size. task_ratelimit is changing values step by step,
   leaving a consistent trace comparing to the randomly jumping
   balanced_dirty_ratelimit. task_ratelimit also has the nice smaller
   errors in stable state and typically larger errors when there are big
   errors in rate.  So it's a pretty good limiting factor for the step
   size of dirty_ratelimit.

Note that bdi->dirty_ratelimit is always tracking balanced_dirty_ratelimit.
task_ratelimit is merely used as a limiting factor.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: dirty rate control

2011-10-03T13:08:56+00:00

It's all about bdi->dirty_ratelimit, which aims to be (write_bw / N)
when there are N dd tasks.

On write() syscall, use bdi->dirty_ratelimit
============================================

    balance_dirty_pages(pages_dirtied)
    {
        task_ratelimit = bdi->dirty_ratelimit * bdi_position_ratio();
        pause = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit;
        sleep(pause);
    }

On every 200ms, update bdi->dirty_ratelimit
===========================================

    bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit()
    {
        task_ratelimit = bdi->dirty_ratelimit * bdi_position_ratio();
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit * write_bw / dirty_rate;
        bdi->dirty_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit
    }

Estimation of balanced bdi->dirty_ratelimit
===========================================

balanced task_ratelimit
-----------------------

balance_dirty_pages() needs to throttle tasks dirtying pages such that
the total amount of dirty pages stays below the specified dirty limit in
order to avoid memory deadlocks. Furthermore we desire fairness in that
tasks get throttled proportionally to the amount of pages they dirty.

IOW we want to throttle tasks such that we match the dirty rate to the
writeout bandwidth, this yields a stable amount of dirty pages:

        dirty_rate == write_bw                                          (1)

The fairness requirement gives us:

        task_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit
                       == write_bw / N                                  (2)

where N is the number of dd tasks.  We don't know N beforehand, but
still can estimate balanced_dirty_ratelimit within 200ms.

Start by throttling each dd task at rate

        task_ratelimit = task_ratelimit_0                               (3)
                         (any non-zero initial value is OK)

After 200ms, we measured

        dirty_rate = # of pages dirtied by all dd's / 200ms
        write_bw   = # of pages written to the disk / 200ms

For the aggressive dd dirtiers, the equality holds

        dirty_rate == N * task_rate
                   == N * task_ratelimit_0                              (4)
Or
        task_ratelimit_0 == dirty_rate / N                              (5)

Now we conclude that the balanced task ratelimit can be estimated by

                                                      write_bw
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit_0 * ----------        (6)
                                                      dirty_rate

Because with (4) and (5) we can get the desired equality (1):

                                                       write_bw
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit == (dirty_rate / N) * ----------
                                                       dirty_rate
                                 == write_bw / N

Then using the balanced task ratelimit we can compute task pause times like:

        task_pause = task->nr_dirtied / task_ratelimit

task_ratelimit with position control
------------------------------------

However, while the above gives us means of matching the dirty rate to
the writeout bandwidth, it at best provides us with a stable dirty page
count (assuming a static system). In order to control the dirty page
count such that it is high enough to provide performance, but does not
exceed the specified limit we need another control.

The dirty position control works by extending (2) to

        task_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit * pos_ratio           (7)

where pos_ratio is a negative feedback function that subjects to

1) f(setpoint) = 1.0
2) df/dx < 0

That is, if the dirty pages are ABOVE the setpoint, we throttle each
task a bit more HEAVY than balanced_dirty_ratelimit, so that the dirty
pages are created less fast than they are cleaned, thus DROP to the
setpoints (and the reverse).

Based on (7) and the assumption that both dirty_ratelimit and pos_ratio
remains CONSTANT for the past 200ms, we get

        task_ratelimit_0 = balanced_dirty_ratelimit * pos_ratio         (8)

Putting (8) into (6), we get the formula used in
bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit():

                                                write_bw
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit *= pos_ratio * ----------              (9)
                                                dirty_rate

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pages

2011-10-03T13:08:56+00:00

Introduce the BDI_DIRTIED counter. It will be used for estimating the
bdi's dirty bandwidth.

CC: Jan Kara 
CC: Michael Rubin 
CC: Peter Zijlstra 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

atomic: use

2011-07-26T23:49:47+00:00

This allows us to move duplicated code in 
(atomic_inc_not_zero() for now) to 

Signed-off-by: Arun Sharma 
Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet 
Cc: Ingo Molnar 
Cc: David Miller 
Cc: Eric Dumazet 
Acked-by: Mike Frysinger 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: bdi write bandwidth estimation

2011-07-10T05:09:01+00:00

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 
CC: Peter Zijlstra 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: account per-bdi accumulated written pages

2011-07-10T05:09:01+00:00

Introduce the BDI_WRITTEN counter. It will be used for estimating the
bdi's write bandwidth.

Peter Zijlstra :
Move BDI_WRITTEN accounting into __bdi_writeout_inc().
This will cover and fix fuse, which only calls bdi_writeout_inc().

CC: Michael Rubin 
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: split inode_wb_list_lock into bdi_writeback.list_lock

2011-06-08T00:25:21+00:00

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          [] bdev_inode_switch_bdi+0x29/0x85
                      inode_wb_list_lock             34          [] inode_wb_list_del+0x22/0x49
                      inode_wb_list_lock          12893          [] __mark_inode_dirty+0x170/0x1d0
                      inode_wb_list_lock          10702          [] writeback_single_inode+0x16d/0x20a
                      ------------------
                      inode_wb_list_lock              2          [] bdev_inode_switch_bdi+0x29/0x85
                      inode_wb_list_lock             19          [] inode_wb_list_del+0x22/0x49
                      inode_wb_list_lock           5550          [] __mark_inode_dirty+0x170/0x1d0
                      inode_wb_list_lock           8511          [] 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          [] inode_wb_list_del+0x5f/0x86
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           1493          [] writeback_inodes_wb+0x3d/0x150
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           3652          [] writeback_sb_inodes+0x123/0x16f
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           1412          [] writeback_single_inode+0x17f/0x223
                ------------------------
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock              3          [] bdi_lock_two+0x46/0x4b
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock              6          [] inode_wb_list_del+0x5f/0x86
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           2061          [] __mark_inode_dirty+0x173/0x1cf
                &(&wb->list_lock)->rlock           2629          [] 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 
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

block: remove per-queue plugging

2011-03-10T07:52:07+00:00

Code has been converted over to the new explicit on-stack plugging,
and delay users have been converted to use the new API for that.
So lets kill off the old plugging along with aops->sync_page().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

mm: declare some external symbols

2010-10-26T23:52:10+00:00

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 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds