linux-toradex.git/include/linux/writeback.h, branch v3.2.14

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: add bg_threshold parameter to __bdi_update_bandwidth()

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

No behavior change.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good area

2011-08-19T14:42:07+00:00

Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609ab10 ("writeback:
introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits") and make the max-pause
area smaller and safe.

This fixes ~30% performance regression in the ext3 data=writeback
fio_mmap_randwrite_64k/fio_mmap_randrw_64k test cases, where there are
12 JBOD disks, on each disk runs 8 concurrent tasks doing reads+writes.

Using deadline scheduler also has a regression, but not that big as CFQ,
so this suggests we have some write starvation.

The test logs show that

- the disks are sometimes under utilized

- global dirty pages sometimes rush high to the pass-good area for
  several hundred seconds, while in the mean time some bdi dirty pages
  drop to very low value (bdi_dirty << bdi_thresh).  Then suddenly the
  global dirty pages dropped under global dirty threshold and bdi_dirty
  rush very high (for example, 2 times higher than bdi_thresh). During
  which time balance_dirty_pages() is not called at all.

So the problems are

1) The random writes progress so slow that they break the assumption of
   the max-pause logic that "8 pages per 200ms is typically more than
   enough to curb heavy dirtiers".

2) The max-pause logic ignored task_bdi_thresh and thus opens the possibility
   for some bdi's to over dirty pages, leading to (bdi_dirty >> bdi_thresh)
   and then (bdi_thresh >> bdi_dirty) for others.

3) The higher max-pause/pass-good thresholds somehow leads to the bad
   swing of dirty pages.

The fix is to allow the task to slightly dirty over task_bdi_thresh, but
no way to exceed bdi_dirty and/or global dirty_thresh.

Tests show that it fixed the JBOD regression completely (both behavior
and performance), while still being able to cut down large pause times
in balance_dirty_pages() for single-disk cases.

Reported-by: Li Shaohua 
Tested-by: Li Shaohua 
Acked-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: scale IO chunk size up to half device bandwidth

2011-07-10T05:09:03+00:00

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 
CC: Dave Chinner 
CC: Chris Mason 
CC: Peter Zijlstra 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits

2011-07-10T05:09:02+00:00

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

writeback: introduce smoothed global dirty limit

2011-07-10T05:09:02+00:00

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

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: make writeback_control.nr_to_write straight

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

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 
Proposed-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: remove .nonblocking and .encountered_congestion

2011-06-08T00:25:23+00:00

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 
Proposed-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang

writeback: remove writeback_control.more_io

2011-06-08T00:25:23+00:00

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 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang