linux-toradex.git/mm/page-writeback.c, branch v3.12.6

writeback: fix negative bdi max pause

2013-10-17T04:35:53+00:00

Toralf runs trinity on UML/i386.  After some time it hangs and the last
message line is

	BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [trinity-child0:1521]

It's found that pages_dirtied becomes very large.  More than 1000000000
pages in this case:

	period = HZ * pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit;
	BUG_ON(pages_dirtied > 2000000000);
	BUG_ON(pages_dirtied > 1000000000);      <---------

UML debug printf shows that we got negative pause here:

	ick: pause : -984
	ick: pages_dirtied : 0
	ick: task_ratelimit: 0

	 pause:
	+       if (pause < 0)  {
	+               extern int printf(char *, ...);
	+               printf("ick : pause : %li\n", pause);
	+               printf("ick: pages_dirtied : %lu\n", pages_dirtied);
	+               printf("ick: task_ratelimit: %lu\n", task_ratelimit);
	+               BUG_ON(1);
	+       }
	        trace_balance_dirty_pages(bdi,

Since pause is bounded by [min_pause, max_pause] where min_pause is also
bounded by max_pause.  It's suspected and demonstrated that the
max_pause calculation goes wrong:

	ick: pause : -717
	ick: min_pause : -177
	ick: max_pause : -717
	ick: pages_dirtied : 14
	ick: task_ratelimit: 0

The problem lies in the two "long = unsigned long" assignments in
bdi_max_pause() which might go negative if the highest bit is 1, and the
min_t(long, ...) check failed to protect it falling under 0.  Fix all of
them by using "unsigned long" throughout the function.

Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu 
Reported-by: Toralf Förster 
Tested-by: Toralf Förster 
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Cc: Richard Weinberger 
Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg: add per cgroup writeback pages accounting

2013-09-12T22:38:02+00:00

Add memcg routines to count writeback pages, later dirty pages will also
be accounted.

After Kame's commit 89c06bd52fb9 ("memcg: use new logic for page stat
accounting"), we can use 'struct page' flag to test page state instead
of per page_cgroup flag.  But memcg has a feature to move a page from a
cgroup to another one and may have race between "move" and "page stat
accounting".  So in order to avoid the race we have designed a new lock:

         mem_cgroup_begin_update_page_stat()
         modify page information        -->(a)
         mem_cgroup_update_page_stat()  -->(b)
         mem_cgroup_end_update_page_stat()

It requires both (a) and (b)(writeback pages accounting) to be pretected
in mem_cgroup_{begin/end}_update_page_stat().  It's full no-op for
!CONFIG_MEMCG, almost no-op if memcg is disabled (but compiled in), rcu
read lock in the most cases (no task is moving), and spin_lock_irqsave
on top in the slow path.

There're two writeback interfaces to modify: test_{clear/set}_page_writeback().
And the lock order is:
	--> memcg->move_lock
	  --> mapping->tree_lock

Signed-off-by: Sha Zhengju 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Reviewed-by: Greg Thelen 
Cc: Fengguang Wu 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/page-writeback.c: add strictlimit feature

2013-09-11T22:58:04+00:00

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 
Cc: Jan Kara 
Cc: Miklos Szeredi 
Cc: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov 
Cc: James Bottomley 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: vmscan: fix do_try_to_free_pages() livelock

2013-09-11T22:58:01+00:00

This patch is based on KOSAKI's work and I add a little more description,
please refer https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/14/74.

Currently, I found system can enter a state that there are lots of free
pages in a zone but only order-0 and order-1 pages which means the zone is
heavily fragmented, then high order allocation could make direct reclaim
path's long stall(ex, 60 seconds) especially in no swap and no compaciton
enviroment.  This problem happened on v3.4, but it seems issue still lives
in current tree, the reason is do_try_to_free_pages enter live lock:

kswapd will go to sleep if the zones have been fully scanned and are still
not balanced.  As kswapd thinks there's little point trying all over again
to avoid infinite loop.  Instead it changes order from high-order to
0-order because kswapd think order-0 is the most important.  Look at
73ce02e9 in detail.  If watermarks are ok, kswapd will go back to sleep
and may leave zone->all_unreclaimable =3D 0.  It assume high-order users
can still perform direct reclaim if they wish.

Direct reclaim continue to reclaim for a high order which is not a
COSTLY_ORDER without oom-killer until kswapd turn on
zone->all_unreclaimble= .  This is because to avoid too early oom-kill.
So it means direct_reclaim depends on kswapd to break this loop.

In worst case, direct-reclaim may continue to page reclaim forever when
kswapd sleeps forever until someone like watchdog detect and finally kill
the process.  As described in:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/103737

We can't turn on zone->all_unreclaimable from direct reclaim path because
direct reclaim path don't take any lock and this way is racy.  Thus this
patch removes zone->all_unreclaimable field completely and recalculates
zone reclaimable state every time.

Note: we can't take the idea that direct-reclaim see zone->pages_scanned
directly and kswapd continue to use zone->all_unreclaimable.  Because, it
is racy.  commit 929bea7c71 (vmscan: all_unreclaimable() use
zone->all_unreclaimable as a name) describes the detail.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: uninline zone_reclaimable_pages() and zone_reclaimable()]
Cc: Aaditya Kumar 
Cc: Ying Han 
Cc: Nick Piggin 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Bob Liu 
Cc: Neil Zhang 
Cc: Russell King - ARM Linux 
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko 
Acked-by: Minchan Kim 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Signed-off-by: Lisa Du 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: revert "page-writeback.c: subtract min_free_kbytes from dirtyable memory"

2013-09-11T22:57:23+00:00

This reverts commit 75f7ad8e043d.  It was the result of a problem
observed with a 3.2 kernel and merged in 3.9, while the issue had been
resolved upstream in 3.3 (commit ab8fabd46f81: "mm: exclude reserved
pages from dirtyable memory").

The "reserved pages" are a superset of min_free_kbytes, thus this change
is redundant and confusing.  Revert it.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Paul Szabo 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Acked-by: Minchan Kim 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

kernel: delete __cpuinit usage from all core kernel files

2013-07-14T23:36:59+00:00

The __cpuinit type of throwaway sections might have made sense
some time ago when RAM was more constrained, but now the savings
do not offset the cost and complications.  For example, the fix in
commit 5e427ec2d0 ("x86: Fix bit corruption at CPU resume time")
is a good example of the nasty type of bugs that can be created
with improper use of the various __init prefixes.

After a discussion on LKML[1] it was decided that cpuinit should go
the way of devinit and be phased out.  Once all the users are gone,
we can then finally remove the macros themselves from linux/init.h.

This removes all the uses of the __cpuinit macros from C files in
the core kernel directories (kernel, init, lib, mm, and include)
that don't really have a specific maintainer.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/5/20/589

Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker

mm: make snapshotting pages for stable writes a per-bio operation

2013-04-29T22:54:33+00:00

Walking a bio's page mappings has proved problematic, so create a new
bio flag to indicate that a bio's data needs to be snapshotted in order
to guarantee stable pages during writeback.  Next, for the one user
(ext3/jbd) of snapshotting, hook all the places where writes can be
initiated without PG_writeback set, and set BIO_SNAP_STABLE there.

We must also flag journal "metadata" bios for stable writeout, since
file data can be written through the journal.  Finally, the
MS_SNAP_STABLE mount flag (only used by ext3) is now superfluous, so get
rid of it.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: rename _submit_bh()'s `flags' to `bio_flags', delobotomize the _submit_bh declaration]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: teeny cleanup]
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong 
Cc: Andy Lutomirski 
Cc: Adrian Hunter 
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy 
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Cc: Jens Axboe 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge tag 'writeback-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux

2013-02-28T21:21:44+00:00

Pull writeback fixes from Wu Fengguang:
 "Two writeback fixes

   - fix negative (setpoint - dirty) in 32bit archs

   - use down_read_trylock() in writeback_inodes_sb(_nr)_if_idle()"

* tag 'writeback-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux:
  Negative (setpoint-dirty) in bdi_position_ratio()
  vfs: re-implement writeback_inodes_sb(_nr)_if_idle() and rename them

Merge branch 'for-3.9/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block

2013-02-28T20:52:24+00:00

Pull block IO core bits from Jens Axboe:
 "Below are the core block IO bits for 3.9.  It was delayed a few days
  since my workstation kept crashing every 2-8h after pulling it into
  current -git, but turns out it is a bug in the new pstate code (divide
  by zero, will report separately).  In any case, it contains:

   - The big cfq/blkcg update from Tejun and and Vivek.

   - Additional block and writeback tracepoints from Tejun.

   - Improvement of the should sort (based on queues) logic in the plug
     flushing.

   - _io() variants of the wait_for_completion() interface, using
     io_schedule() instead of schedule() to contribute to io wait
     properly.

   - Various little fixes.

  You'll get two trivial merge conflicts, which should be easy enough to
  fix up"

Fix up the trivial conflicts due to hlist traversal cleanups (commit
b67bfe0d42ca: "hlist: drop the node parameter from iterators").

* 'for-3.9/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block: (39 commits)
  block: remove redundant check to bd_openers()
  block: use i_size_write() in bd_set_size()
  cfq: fix lock imbalance with failed allocations
  drivers/block/swim3.c: fix null pointer dereference
  block: don't select PERCPU_RWSEM
  block: account iowait time when waiting for completion of IO request
  sched: add wait_for_completion_io[_timeout]
  writeback: add more tracepoints
  block: add block_{touch|dirty}_buffer tracepoint
  buffer: make touch_buffer() an exported function
  block: add @req to bio_{front|back}_merge tracepoints
  block: add missing block_bio_complete() tracepoint
  block: Remove should_sort judgement when flush blk_plug
  block,elevator: use new hashtable implementation
  cfq-iosched: add hierarchical cfq_group statistics
  cfq-iosched: collect stats from dead cfqgs
  cfq-iosched: separate out cfqg_stats_reset() from cfq_pd_reset_stats()
  blkcg: make blkcg_print_blkgs() grab q locks instead of blkcg lock
  block: RCU free request_queue
  blkcg: implement blkg_[rw]stat_recursive_sum() and blkg_[rw]stat_merge()
  ...

page-writeback.c: subtract min_free_kbytes from dirtyable memory

2013-02-24T01:50:17+00:00

When calculating amount of dirtyable memory, min_free_kbytes should be
subtracted because it is not intended for dirty pages.

Addresses http://bugs.debian.org/695182

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix up min_free_kbytes extern declarations]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix min() warning]
Signed-off-by: Paul Szabo 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Wu Fengguang 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds