Commit Graph

228 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Artem Bityutskiy f0cd2dbb6c vfs: kill write_super and sync_supers
Finally we can kill the 'sync_supers' kernel thread along with the
'->write_super()' superblock operation because all the users are gone.
Now every file-system is supposed to self-manage own superblock and
its dirty state.

The nice thing about killing this thread is that it improves power management.
Indeed, 'sync_supers' is a source of monotonic system wake-ups - it woke up
every 5 seconds no matter what - even if there were no dirty superblocks and
even if there were no file-systems using this service (e.g., btrfs and
journalled ext4 do not need it). So it was wasting power most of the time. And
because the thread was in the core of the kernel, all systems had to have it.
So I am quite happy to make it go away.

Interestingly, this thread is a left-over from the pdflush kernel thread which
was a self-forking kernel thread responsible for all the write-back in old
Linux kernels. It was turned into per-block device BDI threads, and
'sync_supers' was a left-over. Thus, R.I.P, pdflush as well.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2012-08-04 01:24:44 +04:00
Wanpeng Li 331cbdeede writeback: Fix some comment errors
Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li <liwp@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-06-09 19:54:47 +08:00
Jan Kara eb608e3a34 block: Convert BDI proportion calculations to flexible proportions
Convert calculations of proportion of writeback each bdi does to new flexible
proportion code. That allows us to use aging period of fixed wallclock time
which gives better proportion estimates given the hugely varying throughput of
different devices.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-06-09 08:37:56 +09:00
Fengguang Wu 68809c7108 writeback: initialize global_dirty_limit
This prevents global_dirty_limit from remaining 0 (the initial value)
for long time, since it's only updated in update_dirty_limit() when
above the dirty freerun area.

It will avoid unexpected consequences when some random code use it as a
convenient approximation of the global dirty threshold.

Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-05-06 13:41:58 +08:00
H Hartley Sweeten 18cf8cf8ba mm: page-writeback.c: local functions should not be exposed globally
The function global_dirtyable_memory is only referenced in this file and
should be marked static to prevent it from being exposed globally.

This quiets the sparse warning:

warning: symbol 'global_dirtyable_memory' was not declared. Should it be static?

Signed-off-by: H Hartley Sweeten <hsweeten@visionengravers.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2012-04-14 17:37:27 +08:00
Linus Torvalds 69e1aaddd6 Ext4 commits for 3.3 merge window; mostly cleanups and bug fixes
The changes to export dirty_writeback_interval are from Artem's s_dirt
 cleanup patch series.  The same is true of the change to remove the
 s_dirt helper functions which never got used by anyone in-tree.  I've
 run these changes by Al Viro, and am carrying them so that Artem can
 more easily fix up the rest of the file systems during the next merge
 window.  (Originally we had hopped to remove the use of s_dirt from
 ext4 during this merge window, but his patches had some bugs, so I
 ultimately ended dropping them from the ext4 tree.)
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Merge tag 'ext4_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4

Pull ext4 updates for 3.4 from Ted Ts'o:
 "Ext4 commits for 3.3 merge window; mostly cleanups and bug fixes

  The changes to export dirty_writeback_interval are from Artem's s_dirt
  cleanup patch series.  The same is true of the change to remove the
  s_dirt helper functions which never got used by anyone in-tree.  I've
  run these changes by Al Viro, and am carrying them so that Artem can
  more easily fix up the rest of the file systems during the next merge
  window.  (Originally we had hopped to remove the use of s_dirt from
  ext4 during this merge window, but his patches had some bugs, so I
  ultimately ended dropping them from the ext4 tree.)"

* tag 'ext4_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4: (66 commits)
  vfs: remove unused superblock helpers
  mm: export dirty_writeback_interval
  ext4: remove useless s_dirt assignment
  ext4: write superblock only once on unmount
  ext4: do not mark superblock as dirty unnecessarily
  ext4: correct ext4_punch_hole return codes
  ext4: remove restrictive checks for EOFBLOCKS_FL
  ext4: always set then trimmed blocks count into len
  ext4: fix trimmed block count accunting
  ext4: fix start and len arguments handling in ext4_trim_fs()
  ext4: update s_free_{inodes,blocks}_count during online resize
  ext4: change some printk() calls to use ext4_msg() instead
  ext4: avoid output message interleaving in ext4_error_<foo>()
  ext4: remove trailing newlines from ext4_msg() and ext4_error() messages
  ext4: add no_printk argument validation, fix fallout
  ext4: remove redundant "EXT4-fs: " from uses of ext4_msg
  ext4: give more helpful error message in ext4_ext_rm_leaf()
  ext4: remove unused code from ext4_ext_map_blocks()
  ext4: rewrite punch hole to use ext4_ext_remove_space()
  jbd2: cleanup journal tail after transaction commit
  ...
2012-03-28 10:02:55 -07:00
Artem Bityutskiy 91913a2942 mm: export dirty_writeback_interval
Export 'dirty_writeback_interval' to make it visible to
file-systems. We are going to push superblock management down to
file-systems and get rid of the 'sync_supers' kernel thread completly.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
2012-03-21 22:33:00 -04:00
Fengguang Wu 47a133339c mm: use global_dirty_limit in throttle_vm_writeout()
When starting a memory hog task, a desktop box w/o swap is found to go
unresponsive for a long time.  It's solely caused by lots of congestion
waits in throttle_vm_writeout():

 gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073384: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
 gnome-system-mo-4201 553.073386: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000
           gtali-4237 553.080377: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
           gtali-4237 553.080378: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000
            Xorg-3483 553.103375: congestion_wait: throttle_vm_writeout+0x70/0x7f shrink_mem_cgroup_zone+0x48f/0x4a1
            Xorg-3483 553.103377: writeback_congestion_wait: usec_timeout=100000 usec_delayed=100000

The root cause is, the dirty threshold is knocked down a lot by the memory
hog task.  Fixed by using global_dirty_limit which decreases gradually on
such events and can guarantee we stay above (the also decreasing) nr_dirty
in the progress of following down to the new dirty threshold.

Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-03-21 17:54:58 -07:00
Linus Torvalds 001a541ea9 Merge branch 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux
* 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux:
  writeback: move MIN_WRITEBACK_PAGES to fs-writeback.c
  writeback: balanced_rate cannot exceed write bandwidth
  writeback: do strict bdi dirty_exceeded
  writeback: avoid tiny dirty poll intervals
  writeback: max, min and target dirty pause time
  writeback: dirty ratelimit - think time compensation
  btrfs: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writes
  writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirty
  writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writes
  writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasks
  writeback: Include all dirty inodes in background writeback
2012-01-10 16:59:59 -08:00
Johannes Weiner a756cf5908 mm: try to distribute dirty pages fairly across zones
The maximum number of dirty pages that exist in the system at any time is
determined by a number of pages considered dirtyable and a user-configured
percentage of those, or an absolute number in bytes.

This number of dirtyable pages is the sum of memory provided by all the
zones in the system minus their lowmem reserves and high watermarks, so
that the system can retain a healthy number of free pages without having
to reclaim dirty pages.

But there is a flaw in that we have a zoned page allocator which does not
care about the global state but rather the state of individual memory
zones.  And right now there is nothing that prevents one zone from filling
up with dirty pages while other zones are spared, which frequently leads
to situations where kswapd, in order to restore the watermark of free
pages, does indeed have to write pages from that zone's LRU list.  This
can interfere so badly with IO from the flusher threads that major
filesystems (btrfs, xfs, ext4) mostly ignore write requests from reclaim
already, taking away the VM's only possibility to keep such a zone
balanced, aside from hoping the flushers will soon clean pages from that
zone.

Enter per-zone dirty limits.  They are to a zone's dirtyable memory what
the global limit is to the global amount of dirtyable memory, and try to
make sure that no single zone receives more than its fair share of the
globally allowed dirty pages in the first place.  As the number of pages
considered dirtyable excludes the zones' lowmem reserves and high
watermarks, the maximum number of dirty pages in a zone is such that the
zone can always be balanced without requiring page cleaning.

As this is a placement decision in the page allocator and pages are
dirtied only after the allocation, this patch allows allocators to pass
__GFP_WRITE when they know in advance that the page will be written to and
become dirty soon.  The page allocator will then attempt to allocate from
the first zone of the zonelist - which on NUMA is determined by the task's
NUMA memory policy - that has not exceeded its dirty limit.

At first glance, it would appear that the diversion to lower zones can
increase pressure on them, but this is not the case.  With a full high
zone, allocations will be diverted to lower zones eventually, so it is
more of a shift in timing of the lower zone allocations.  Workloads that
previously could fit their dirty pages completely in the higher zone may
be forced to allocate from lower zones, but the amount of pages that
"spill over" are limited themselves by the lower zones' dirty constraints,
and thus unlikely to become a problem.

For now, the problem of unfair dirty page distribution remains for NUMA
configurations where the zones allowed for allocation are in sum not big
enough to trigger the global dirty limits, wake up the flusher threads and
remedy the situation.  Because of this, an allocation that could not
succeed on any of the considered zones is allowed to ignore the dirty
limits before going into direct reclaim or even failing the allocation,
until a future patch changes the global dirty throttling and flusher
thread activation so that they take individual zone states into account.

			Test results

15M DMA + 3246M DMA32 + 504 Normal = 3765M memory
40% dirty ratio
16G USB thumb drive
10 runs of dd if=/dev/zero of=disk/zeroes bs=32k count=$((10 << 15))

		seconds			nr_vmscan_write
		        (stddev)	       min|     median|        max
xfs
vanilla:	 549.747( 3.492)	     0.000|      0.000|      0.000
patched:	 550.996( 3.802)	     0.000|      0.000|      0.000

fuse-ntfs
vanilla:	1183.094(53.178)	 54349.000|  59341.000|  65163.000
patched:	 558.049(17.914)	     0.000|      0.000|     43.000

btrfs
vanilla:	 573.679(14.015)	156657.000| 460178.000| 606926.000
patched:	 563.365(11.368)	     0.000|      0.000|   1362.000

ext4
vanilla:	 561.197(15.782)	     0.000|2725438.000|4143837.000
patched:	 568.806(17.496)	     0.000|      0.000|      0.000

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Tested-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10 16:30:43 -08:00
Johannes Weiner ccafa2879f mm: writeback: cleanups in preparation for per-zone dirty limits
The next patch will introduce per-zone dirty limiting functions in
addition to the traditional global dirty limiting.

Rename determine_dirtyable_memory() to global_dirtyable_memory() before
adding the zone-specific version, and fix up its documentation.

Also, move the functions to determine the dirtyable memory and the
function to calculate the dirty limit based on that together so that their
relationship is more apparent and that they can be commented on as a
group.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10 16:30:43 -08:00
Johannes Weiner ab8fabd46f mm: exclude reserved pages from dirtyable memory
Per-zone dirty limits try to distribute page cache pages allocated for
writing across zones in proportion to the individual zone sizes, to reduce
the likelihood of reclaim having to write back individual pages from the
LRU lists in order to make progress.

This patch:

The amount of dirtyable pages should not include the full number of free
pages: there is a number of reserved pages that the page allocator and
kswapd always try to keep free.

The closer (reclaimable pages - dirty pages) is to the number of reserved
pages, the more likely it becomes for reclaim to run into dirty pages:

       +----------+ ---
       |   anon   |  |
       +----------+  |
       |          |  |
       |          |  -- dirty limit new    -- flusher new
       |   file   |  |                     |
       |          |  |                     |
       |          |  -- dirty limit old    -- flusher old
       |          |                        |
       +----------+                       --- reclaim
       | reserved |
       +----------+
       |  kernel  |
       +----------+

This patch introduces a per-zone dirty reserve that takes both the lowmem
reserve as well as the high watermark of the zone into account, and a
global sum of those per-zone values that is subtracted from the global
amount of dirtyable pages.  The lowmem reserve is unavailable to page
cache allocations and kswapd tries to keep the high watermark free.  We
don't want to end up in a situation where reclaim has to clean pages in
order to balance zones.

Not treating reserved pages as dirtyable on a global level is only a
conceptual fix.  In reality, dirty pages are not distributed equally
across zones and reclaim runs into dirty pages on a regular basis.

But it is important to get this right before tackling the problem on a
per-zone level, where the distance between reclaim and the dirty pages is
mostly much smaller in absolute numbers.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix highmem build]
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10 16:30:43 -08:00
Johannes Weiner 1edf223485 mm/page-writeback.c: make determine_dirtyable_memory static again
The tracing ring-buffer used this function briefly, but not anymore.
Make it local to the writeback code again.

Also, move the function so that no forward declaration needs to be
reintroduced.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-01-10 16:30:41 -08:00
Al Viro ff01bb4832 fs: move code out of buffer.c
Move invalidate_bdev, block_sync_page into fs/block_dev.c.  Export
kill_bdev as well, so brd doesn't have to open code it.  Reduce
buffer_head.h requirement accordingly.

Removed a rather large comment from invalidate_bdev, as it looked a bit
obsolete to bother moving.  The small comment replacing it says enough.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2012-01-03 22:54:07 -05:00
Wu Fengguang bdaac4902a writeback: balanced_rate cannot exceed write bandwidth
Add an upper limit to balanced_rate according to the below inequality.
This filters out some rare but huge singular points, which at least
enables more readable gnuplot figures.

When there are N dd dirtiers,

	balanced_dirty_ratelimit = write_bw / N

So it holds that

	balanced_dirty_ratelimit <= write_bw

The singular points originate from dirty_rate in the below formular:

        balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit * write_bw / dirty_rate
where
	dirty_rate = (number of page dirties in the past 200ms) / 200ms

In the extreme case, if all dd tasks suddenly get blocked on something
else and hence no pages are dirtied at all, dirty_rate will be 0 and
balanced_dirty_ratelimit will be inf. This could happen in reality.

Note that these huge singular points are not a real threat, since they
are _guaranteed_ to be filtered out by the
	min(balanced_dirty_ratelimit, task_ratelimit)
line in bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit(). task_ratelimit is based on the
number of dirty pages, which will never _suddenly_ fly away like
balanced_dirty_ratelimit. So any weirdly large balanced_dirty_ratelimit
will be cut down to the level of task_ratelimit.

There won't be tiny singular points though, as long as the dirty pages
lie inside the dirty throttling region (above the freerun region).
Because there the dd tasks will be throttled by balanced_dirty_pages()
and won't be able to suddenly dirty much more pages than average.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:33 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 8279194054 writeback: do strict bdi dirty_exceeded
This helps to reduce dirty throttling polls and hence CPU overheads.

bdi->dirty_exceeded typically only helps when suddenly starting 100+
dd's on a disk, in which case the dd's may need to poll
balance_dirty_pages() earlier than tsk->nr_dirtied_pause.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:31 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 5b9b357435 writeback: avoid tiny dirty poll intervals
The LKP tests see big 56% regression for the case fio_mmap_randwrite_64k.
Shaohua manages to root cause it to be the much smaller dirty pause times
and hence much more frequent invocations to the IO-less balance_dirty_pages().
Since fio_mmap_randwrite_64k effectively contains both reads and writes,
the more frequent pauses triggered more idling in the cfq IO scheduler.

The solution is to increase pause time all the way up to the max 200ms
in this case, which is found to restore most performance. This will help
reduce CPU overheads in other cases, too.

Note that I don't expect many performance critical workloads to run this
access pattern: the mmap read-on-write is rather inefficient and could
be avoided by doing normal writes syscalls.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reported-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Tested-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:30 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 7ccb9ad536 writeback: max, min and target dirty pause time
Control the pause time and the call intervals to balance_dirty_pages()
with three parameters:

1) max_pause, limited by bdi_dirty and MAX_PAUSE

2) the target pause time, grows with the number of dd tasks
   and is normally limited by max_pause/2

3) the minimal pause, set to half the target pause
   and is used to skip short sleeps and accumulate them into bigger ones

The typical behaviors after patch:

- if ever task_ratelimit is far below dirty_ratelimit, the pause time
  will remain constant at max_pause and nr_dirtied_pause will be
  fluctuating with task_ratelimit

- in the normal cases, nr_dirtied_pause will remain stable (keep in the
  same pace with dirty_ratelimit) and the pause time will be fluctuating
  with task_ratelimit

In summary, someone has to fluctuate with task_ratelimit, because

	task_ratelimit = nr_dirtied_pause / pause

We normally prefer a stable nr_dirtied_pause, until reaching max_pause.

The notable behavior changes are:

- in stable workloads, there will no longer be sudden big trajectory
  switching of nr_dirtied_pause as concerned by Peter. It will be as
  smooth as dirty_ratelimit and changing proportionally with it (as
  always, assuming bdi bandwidth does not fluctuate across 2^N lines,
  otherwise nr_dirtied_pause will show up in 2+ parallel trajectories)

- in the rare cases when something keeps task_ratelimit far below
  dirty_ratelimit, the smoothness can no longer be retained and
  nr_dirtied_pause will be "dancing" with task_ratelimit. This fixes a
  (not that destructive but still not good) bug that
	  dirty_ratelimit gets brought down undesirably
	  <= balanced_dirty_ratelimit is under estimated
	  <= weakly executed task_ratelimit
	  <= pause goes too large and gets trimmed down to max_pause
	  <= nr_dirtied_pause (based on dirty_ratelimit) is set too large
	  <= dirty_ratelimit being much larger than task_ratelimit

- introduce min_pause to avoid small pause sleeps

- when pause is trimmed down to max_pause, try to compensate it at the
  next pause time

The "refactor" type of changes are:

The max_pause equation is slightly transformed to make it slightly more
efficient.

We now scale target_pause by (N * 10ms) on 2^N concurrent tasks, which
is effectively equal to the original scaling max_pause by (N * 20ms)
because the original code does implicit target_pause ~= max_pause / 2.
Based on the same implicit ratio, target_pause starts with 10ms on 1 dd.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:28 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 83712358ba writeback: dirty ratelimit - think time compensation
Compensate the task's think time when computing the final pause time,
so that ->dirty_ratelimit can be executed accurately.

        think time := time spend outside of balance_dirty_pages()

In the rare case that the task slept longer than the 200ms period time
(result in negative pause time), the sleep time will be compensated in
the following periods, too, if it's less than 1 second.

Accumulated errors are carefully avoided as long as the max pause area
is not hitted.

Pseudo code:

        period = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit;
        think = jiffies - dirty_paused_when;
        pause = period - think;

1) normal case: period > think

        pause = period - think
        dirty_paused_when = jiffies + pause
        nr_dirtied = 0

                             period time
              |===============================>|
                  think time      pause time
              |===============>|==============>|
        ------|----------------|---------------|------------------------
        dirty_paused_when   jiffies

2) no pause case: period <= think

        don't pause; reduce future pause time by:
        dirty_paused_when += period
        nr_dirtied = 0

                           period time
              |===============================>|
                                  think time
              |===================================================>|
        ------|--------------------------------+-------------------|----
        dirty_paused_when                                       jiffies

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:27 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 2f800fbd77 writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirty
De-account the accumulative dirty counters on page redirty.

Page redirties (very common in ext4) will introduce mismatch between
counters (a) and (b)

a) NR_DIRTIED, BDI_DIRTIED, tsk->nr_dirtied
b) NR_WRITTEN, BDI_WRITTEN

This will introduce systematic errors in balanced_rate and result in
dirty page position errors (ie. the dirty pages are no longer balanced
around the global/bdi setpoints).

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:23 +08:00
Wu Fengguang d3bc1fef93 writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on sub-page writes
When dd in 512bytes, generic_perform_write() calls
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() 8 times for the same page, but
obviously the page is only dirtied once.

Fix it by accounting tsk->nr_dirtied and bdp_ratelimits at page dirty time.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:22 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 54848d73f9 writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasks
It's a years long problem that a large number of short-lived dirtiers
(eg. gcc instances in a fast kernel build) may starve long-run dirtiers
(eg. dd) as well as pushing the dirty pages to the global hard limit.

The solution is to charge the pages dirtied by the exited gcc to the
other random dirtying tasks. It sounds not perfect, however should
behave good enough in practice, seeing as that throttled tasks aren't
actually running so those that are running are more likely to pick it up
and get throttled, therefore promoting an equal spread.

Randy: fix compile error: 'dirty_throttle_leaks' undeclared in exit.c

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-18 14:20:20 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 82e230a07d writeback: set max_pause to lowest value on zero bdi_dirty
Some trace shows lots of bdi_dirty=0 lines where it's actually some
small value if w/o the accounting errors in the per-cpu bdi stats.

In this case the max pause time should really be set to the smallest
(non-zero) value to avoid IO queue underrun and improve throughput.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-08 10:49:29 +08:00
Wu Fengguang c5c6343c4d writeback: permit through good bdi even when global dirty exceeded
On a system with 1 local mount and 1 NFS mount, if the NFS server
becomes not responding when dd to the NFS mount, the NFS dirty pages may
exceed the global dirty limit and _every_ task involving writing will be
blocked. The whole system appears unresponsive.

The workaround is to permit through the bdi's that only has a small
number of dirty pages. The number chosen (bdi_stat_error pages) is not
enough to enable the local disk to run in optimal throughput, however is
enough to make the system responsive on a broken NFS mount. The user can
then kill the dirtiers on the NFS mount and increase the global dirty
limit to bring up the local disk's throughput.

It risks allowing dirty pages to grow much larger than the global dirty
limit when there are 1000+ mounts, however that's very unlikely to happen,
especially in low memory profiles.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-08 10:49:27 +08:00
Wu Fengguang aed21ad28b writeback: comment on the bdi dirty threshold
We do "floating proportions" to let active devices to grow its target
share of dirty pages and stalled/inactive devices to decrease its target
share over time.

It works well except in the case of "an inactive disk suddenly goes
busy", where the initial target share may be too small. To mitigate
this, bdi_position_ratio() has the below line to raise a small
bdi_thresh when it's safe to do so, so that the disk be feed with enough
dirty pages for efficient IO and in turn fast rampup of bdi_thresh:

        bdi_thresh = max(bdi_thresh, (limit - dirty) / 8);

balance_dirty_pages() normally does negative feedback control which
adjusts ratelimit to balance the bdi dirty pages around the target.
In some extreme cases when that is not enough, it will have to block
the tasks completely until the bdi dirty pages drop below bdi_thresh.

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-12-08 10:49:20 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 468e6a20af writeback: remove vm_dirties and task->dirties
They are not used any more.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-17 20:49:06 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 1df647197c writeback: hard throttle 1000+ dd on a slow USB stick
The sleep based balance_dirty_pages() can pause at most MAX_PAUSE=200ms
on every 1 4KB-page, which means it cannot throttle a task under
4KB/200ms=20KB/s. So when there are more than 512 dd writing to a
10MB/s USB stick, its bdi dirty pages could grow out of control.

Even if we can increase MAX_PAUSE, the minimal (task_ratelimit = 1)
means a limit of 4KB/s.
                                                       
They can eventually be safeguarded by the global limit check 
(nr_dirty < dirty_thresh). However if someone is also writing to an 
HDD at the same time, it'll get poor HDD write performance.
                                                       
We at least want to maintain good write performance for other devices
when one device is attacked by some "massive parallel" workload, or
suffers from slow write bandwidth, or somehow get stalled due to some 
error condition (eg. NFS server not responding).

For a stalled device, we need to completely block its dirtiers, too,
before its bdi dirty pages grow all the way up to the global limit and
leave no space for the other functional devices.

So change the loop exit condition to

	/*
	 * Always enforce global dirty limit; also enforce bdi dirty limit
	 * if the normal max_pause sleeps cannot keep things under control.
	 */
	if (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh &&
	    (bdi_dirty < bdi_thresh || bdi->dirty_ratelimit > 1))
		break;

which can be further simplified to

	if (task_ratelimit)
		break;

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-17 20:39:32 +08:00
Jan Kara 499d05ecf9 mm: Make task in balance_dirty_pages() killable
There is no reason why task in balance_dirty_pages() shouldn't be killable
and it helps in recovering from some error conditions (like when filesystem
goes in error state and cannot accept writeback anymore but we still want to
kill processes using it to be able to unmount it).

There will be follow up patches to further abort the generic_perform_write()
and other filesystem write loops, to avoid large write + SIGKILL combination
exceeding the dirty limit and possibly strange OOM.

Reported-by: Kazuya Mio <k-mio@sx.jp.nec.com>
Tested-by: Kazuya Mio <k-mio@sx.jp.nec.com>
Reviewed-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-16 19:53:44 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 3a73dbbc9b writeback: fix uninitialized task_ratelimit
In balance_dirty_pages() task_ratelimit may be not initialized
(initialization skiped by goto pause), and then used when calling
tracing hook.

Fix it by moving the task_ratelimit assignment before goto pause.

Reported-by: Witold Baryluk <baryluk@smp.if.uj.edu.pl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-11-07 19:19:28 +08:00
Linus Torvalds 32aaeffbd4 Merge branch 'modsplit-Oct31_2011' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulg/linux
* 'modsplit-Oct31_2011' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulg/linux: (230 commits)
  Revert "tracing: Include module.h in define_trace.h"
  irq: don't put module.h into irq.h for tracking irqgen modules.
  bluetooth: macroize two small inlines to avoid module.h
  ip_vs.h: fix implicit use of module_get/module_put from module.h
  nf_conntrack.h: fix up fallout from implicit moduleparam.h presence
  include: replace linux/module.h with "struct module" wherever possible
  include: convert various register fcns to macros to avoid include chaining
  crypto.h: remove unused crypto_tfm_alg_modname() inline
  uwb.h: fix implicit use of asm/page.h for PAGE_SIZE
  pm_runtime.h: explicitly requires notifier.h
  linux/dmaengine.h: fix implicit use of bitmap.h and asm/page.h
  miscdevice.h: fix up implicit use of lists and types
  stop_machine.h: fix implicit use of smp.h for smp_processor_id
  of: fix implicit use of errno.h in include/linux/of.h
  of_platform.h: delete needless include <linux/module.h>
  acpi: remove module.h include from platform/aclinux.h
  miscdevice.h: delete unnecessary inclusion of module.h
  device_cgroup.h: delete needless include <linux/module.h>
  net: sch_generic remove redundant use of <linux/module.h>
  net: inet_timewait_sock doesnt need <linux/module.h>
  ...

Fix up trivial conflicts (other header files, and  removal of the ab3550 mfd driver) in
 - drivers/media/dvb/frontends/dibx000_common.c
 - drivers/media/video/{mt9m111.c,ov6650.c}
 - drivers/mfd/ab3550-core.c
 - include/linux/dmaengine.h
2011-11-06 19:44:47 -08:00
Linus Torvalds 208bca0860 Merge branch 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux
* 'writeback-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux:
  writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_work
  writeback: send work item to queue_io, move_expired_inodes
  writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pages
  writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimit
  writeback: fix ppc compile warnings on do_div(long long, unsigned long)
  writeback: per-bdi background threshold
  writeback: dirty position control - bdi reserve area
  writeback: control dirty pause time
  writeback: limit max dirty pause time
  writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages()
  writeback: per task dirty rate limit
  writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimit
  writeback: dirty rate control
  writeback: add bg_threshold parameter to __bdi_update_bandwidth()
  writeback: dirty position control
  writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pages
2011-11-06 19:02:23 -08:00
Johannes Weiner d08c429b06 mm/page-writeback.c: document bdi_min_ratio
Looks like someone got distracted after adding the comment characters.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-10-31 17:30:45 -07:00
Paul Gortmaker b95f1b31b7 mm: Map most files to use export.h instead of module.h
The files changed within are only using the EXPORT_SYMBOL
macro variants.  They are not using core modular infrastructure
and hence don't need module.h but only the export.h header.

Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
2011-10-31 09:20:12 -04:00
Curt Wohlgemuth 0e175a1835 writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_work
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 <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31 00:33:36 +08:00
Wu Fengguang ece13ac31b writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pages
Useful for analyzing the dynamics of the throttling algorithms and
debugging user reported problems.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31 00:29:38 +08:00
Wu Fengguang b48c104d22 writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimit
It helps understand how various throttle bandwidths are updated.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31 00:29:21 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 50657fc4df writeback: fix ppc compile warnings on do_div(long long, unsigned long)
Fix powerpc compile warnings

mm/page-writeback.c: In function 'bdi_position_ratio':
mm/page-writeback.c:622:3: warning: comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast [enabled by default]
page-writeback.c:635:4: warning: comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast [enabled by default]

Also fix gcc "uninitialized var" warnings.

Reported-by: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-11 17:45:24 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 8927f66c4e writeback: dirty position control - bdi reserve area
Keep a minimal pool of dirty pages for each bdi, so that the disk IO
queues won't underrun. Also gently increase a small bdi_thresh to avoid
it stuck in 0 for some light dirtied bdi.

It's particularly useful for JBOD and small memory system.

It may result in (pos_ratio > 1) at the setpoint and push the dirty
pages high. This is more or less intended because the bdi is in the
danger of IO queue underflow.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:58 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 57fc978cfb writeback: control dirty pause time
The dirty pause time shall ultimately be controlled by adjusting
nr_dirtied_pause, since there is relationship

	pause = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit

Assuming

	pages_dirtied ~= nr_dirtied_pause
	task_ratelimit ~= dirty_ratelimit

We get

	nr_dirtied_pause ~= dirty_ratelimit * desired_pause

Here dirty_ratelimit is preferred over task_ratelimit because it's
more stable.

It's also important to limit possible large transitional errors:

- bw is changing quickly
- pages_dirtied << nr_dirtied_pause on entering dirty exceeded area
- pages_dirtied >> nr_dirtied_pause on btrfs (to be improved by a
  separate fix, but still expect non-trivial errors)

So we end up using the above formula inside clamp_val().

The best test case for this code is to run 100 "dd bs=4M" tasks on
btrfs and check its pause time distribution.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:58 +08:00
Wu Fengguang c8462cc9de writeback: limit max dirty pause time
Apply two policies to scale down the max pause time for

1) small number of concurrent dirtiers
2) small memory system (comparing to storage bandwidth)

MAX_PAUSE=200ms may only be suitable for high end servers with lots of
concurrent dirtiers, where the large pause time can reduce much overheads.

Otherwise, smaller pause time is desirable whenever possible, so as to
get good responsiveness and smooth user experiences. It's actually
required for good disk utilization in the case when all the dirty pages
can be synced to disk within MAX_PAUSE=200ms.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 143dfe8611 writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages()
As proposed by Chris, Dave and Jan, don't start foreground writeback IO
inside balance_dirty_pages(). Instead, simply let it idle sleep for some
time to throttle the dirtying task. In the mean while, kick off the
per-bdi flusher thread to do background writeback IO.

RATIONALS
=========

- disk seeks on concurrent writeback of multiple inodes (Dave Chinner)

  If every thread doing writes and being throttled start foreground
  writeback, it leads to N IO submitters from at least N different
  inodes at the same time, end up with N different sets of IO being
  issued with potentially zero locality to each other, resulting in
  much lower elevator sort/merge efficiency and hence we seek the disk
  all over the place to service the different sets of IO.
  OTOH, if there is only one submission thread, it doesn't jump between
  inodes in the same way when congestion clears - it keeps writing to
  the same inode, resulting in large related chunks of sequential IOs
  being issued to the disk. This is more efficient than the above
  foreground writeback because the elevator works better and the disk
  seeks less.

- lock contention and cache bouncing on concurrent IO submitters (Dave Chinner)

  With this patchset, the fs_mark benchmark on a 12-drive software RAID0 goes
  from CPU bound to IO bound, freeing "3-4 CPUs worth of spinlock contention".

  * "CPU usage has dropped by ~55%", "it certainly appears that most of
    the CPU time saving comes from the removal of contention on the
    inode_wb_list_lock" (IMHO at least 10% comes from the reduction of
    cacheline bouncing, because the new code is able to call much less
    frequently into balance_dirty_pages() and hence access the global
    page states)

  * the user space "App overhead" is reduced by 20%, by avoiding the
    cacheline pollution by the complex writeback code path

  * "for a ~5% throughput reduction", "the number of write IOs have
    dropped by ~25%", and the elapsed time reduced from 41:42.17 to
    40:53.23.

  * On a simple test of 100 dd, it reduces the CPU %system time from 30% to 3%,
    and improves IO throughput from 38MB/s to 42MB/s.

- IO size too small for fast arrays and too large for slow USB sticks

  The write_chunk used by current balance_dirty_pages() cannot be
  directly set to some large value (eg. 128MB) for better IO efficiency.
  Because it could lead to more than 1 second user perceivable stalls.
  Even the current 4MB write size may be too large for slow USB sticks.
  The fact that balance_dirty_pages() starts IO on itself couples the
  IO size to wait time, which makes it hard to do suitable IO size while
  keeping the wait time under control.

  Now it's possible to increase writeback chunk size proportional to the
  disk bandwidth. In a simple test of 50 dd's on XFS, 1-HDD, 3GB ram,
  the larger writeback size dramatically reduces the seek count to 1/10
  (far beyond my expectation) and improves the write throughput by 24%.

- long block time in balance_dirty_pages() hurts desktop responsiveness

  Many of us may have the experience: it often takes a couple of seconds
  or even long time to stop a heavy writing dd/cp/tar command with
  Ctrl-C or "kill -9".

- IO pipeline broken by bumpy write() progress

  There are a broad class of "loop {read(buf); write(buf);}" applications
  whose read() pipeline will be under-utilized or even come to a stop if
  the write()s have long latencies _or_ don't progress in a constant rate.
  The current threshold based throttling inherently transfers the large
  low level IO completion fluctuations to bumpy application write()s,
  and further deteriorates with increasing number of dirtiers and/or bdi's.

  For example, when doing 50 dd's + 1 remote rsync to an XFS partition,
  the rsync progresses very bumpy in legacy kernel, and throughput is
  improved by 67% by this patchset. (plus the larger write chunk size,
  it will be 93% speedup).

  The new rate based throttling can support 1000+ dd's with excellent
  smoothness, low latency and low overheads.

For the above reasons, it's much better to do IO-less and low latency
pauses in balance_dirty_pages().

Jan Kara, Dave Chinner and me explored the scheme to let
balance_dirty_pages() wait for enough writeback IO completions to
safeguard the dirty limit. However it's found to have two problems:

- in large NUMA systems, the per-cpu counters may have big accounting
  errors, leading to big throttle wait time and jitters.

- NFS may kill large amount of unstable pages with one single COMMIT.
  Because NFS server serves COMMIT with expensive fsync() IOs, it is
  desirable to delay and reduce the number of COMMITs. So it's not
  likely to optimize away such kind of bursty IO completions, and the
  resulted large (and tiny) stall times in IO completion based throttling.

So here is a pause time oriented approach, which tries to control the
pause time in each balance_dirty_pages() invocations, by controlling
the number of pages dirtied before calling balance_dirty_pages(), for
smooth and efficient dirty throttling:

- avoid useless (eg. zero pause time) balance_dirty_pages() calls
- avoid too small pause time (less than   4ms, which burns CPU power)
- avoid too large pause time (more than 200ms, which hurts responsiveness)
- avoid big fluctuations of pause times

It can control pause times at will. The default policy (in a followup
patch) will be to do ~10ms pauses in 1-dd case, and increase to ~100ms
in 1000-dd case.

BEHAVIOR CHANGE
===============

(1) dirty threshold

Users will notice that the applications will get throttled once crossing
the global (background + dirty)/2=15% threshold, and then balanced around
17.5%. Before patch, the behavior is to just throttle it at 20% dirtyable
memory in 1-dd case.

Since the task will be soft throttled earlier than before, it may be
perceived by end users as performance "slow down" if his application
happens to dirty more than 15% dirtyable memory.

(2) smoothness/responsiveness

Users will notice a more responsive system during heavy writeback.
"killall dd" will take effect instantly.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 9d823e8f6b writeback: per task dirty rate limit
Add two fields to task_struct.

1) account dirtied pages in the individual tasks, for accuracy
2) per-task balance_dirty_pages() call intervals, for flexibility

The balance_dirty_pages() call interval (ie. nr_dirtied_pause) will
scale near-sqrt to the safety gap between dirty pages and threshold.

The main problem of per-task nr_dirtied is, if 1k+ tasks start dirtying
pages at exactly the same time, each task will be assigned a large
initial nr_dirtied_pause, so that the dirty threshold will be exceeded
long before each task reached its nr_dirtied_pause and hence call
balance_dirty_pages().

The solution is to watch for the number of pages dirtied on each CPU in
between the calls into balance_dirty_pages(). If it exceeds ratelimit_pages
(3% dirty threshold), force call balance_dirty_pages() for a chance to
set bdi->dirty_exceeded. In normal situations, this safeguarding
condition is not expected to trigger at all.

On the sqrt in dirty_poll_interval():

It will serve as an initial guess when dirty pages are still in the
freerun area.

When dirty pages are floating inside the dirty control scope [freerun,
limit], a followup patch will use some refined dirty poll interval to
get the desired pause time.

   thresh-dirty (MB)    sqrt
		   1      16
		   2      22
		   4      32
		   8      45
		  16      64
		  32      90
		  64     128
		 128     181
		 256     256
		 512     362
		1024     512

The above table means, given 1MB (or 1GB) gap and the dd tasks polling
balance_dirty_pages() on every 16 (or 512) pages, the dirty limit won't
be exceeded as long as there are less than 16 (or 512) concurrent dd's.

So sqrt naturally leads to less overheads and more safe concurrent tasks
for large memory servers, which have large (thresh-freerun) gaps.

peter: keep the per-CPU ratelimit for safeguarding the 1k+ tasks case

CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reviewed-by: Andrea Righi <andrea@betterlinux.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 7381131cbc writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimit
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 <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:57 +08:00
Wu Fengguang be3ffa2764 writeback: dirty rate control
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 <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang af6a311384 writeback: add bg_threshold parameter to __bdi_update_bandwidth()
No behavior change.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang 6c14ae1e92 writeback: dirty position control
bdi_position_ratio() provides a scale factor to bdi->dirty_ratelimit, so
that the resulted task rate limit can drive the dirty pages back to the
global/bdi setpoints.

Old scheme is,
                                          |
                           free run area  |  throttle area
  ----------------------------------------+---------------------------->
                                    thresh^                  dirty pages

New scheme is,

  ^ task rate limit
  |
  |            *
  |             *
  |              *
  |[free run]      *      [smooth throttled]
  |                  *
  |                     *
  |                         *
  ..bdi->dirty_ratelimit..........*
  |                               .     *
  |                               .          *
  |                               .              *
  |                               .                 *
  |                               .                    *
  +-------------------------------.-----------------------*------------>
                          setpoint^                  limit^  dirty pages

The slope of the bdi control line should be

1) large enough to pull the dirty pages to setpoint reasonably fast

2) small enough to avoid big fluctuations in the resulted pos_ratio and
   hence task ratelimit

Since the fluctuation range of the bdi dirty pages is typically observed
to be within 1-second worth of data, the bdi control line's slope is
selected to be a linear function of bdi write bandwidth, so that it can
adapt to slow/fast storage devices well.

Assume the bdi control line

	pos_ratio = 1.0 + k * (dirty - bdi_setpoint)

where k is the negative slope.

If targeting for 12.5% fluctuation range in pos_ratio when dirty pages
are fluctuating in range

	[bdi_setpoint - write_bw/2, bdi_setpoint + write_bw/2],

we get slope

	k = - 1 / (8 * write_bw)

Let pos_ratio(x_intercept) = 0, we get the parameter used in code:

	x_intercept = bdi_setpoint + 8 * write_bw

The global/bdi slopes are nicely complementing each other when the
system has only one major bdi (indicated by bdi_thresh ~= thresh):

1) slope of global control line    => scaling to the control scope size
2) slope of main bdi control line  => scaling to the writeout bandwidth

so that

- in memory tight systems, (1) becomes strong enough to squeeze dirty
  pages inside the control scope

- in large memory systems where the "gravity" of (1) for pulling the
  dirty pages to setpoint is too weak, (2) can back (1) up and drive
  dirty pages to bdi_setpoint ~= setpoint reasonably fast.

Unfortunately in JBOD setups, the fluctuation range of bdi threshold
is related to memory size due to the interferences between disks.  In
this case, the bdi slope will be weighted sum of write_bw and bdi_thresh.

Given equations

        span = x_intercept - bdi_setpoint
        k = df/dx = - 1 / span

and the extremum values

        span = bdi_thresh
        dx = bdi_thresh

we get

        df = - dx / span = - 1.0

That means, when bdi_dirty deviates bdi_thresh up, pos_ratio and hence
task ratelimit will fluctuate by -100%.

peter: use 3rd order polynomial for the global control line

CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang c8e28ce049 writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pages
Introduce the BDI_DIRTIED counter. It will be used for estimating the
bdi's dirty bandwidth.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03 21:08:56 +08:00
Wu Fengguang bb0822954a squeeze max-pause area and drop pass-good area
Revert the pass-good area introduced in ffd1f609ab ("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 <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Tested-by: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-08-19 22:42:07 +08:00
Linus Torvalds f01ef569cd Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/writeback
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/writeback: (27 commits)
  mm: properly reflect task dirty limits in dirty_exceeded logic
  writeback: don't busy retry writeback on new/freeing inodes
  writeback: scale IO chunk size up to half device bandwidth
  writeback: trace global_dirty_state
  writeback: introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits
  writeback: introduce smoothed global dirty limit
  writeback: consolidate variable names in balance_dirty_pages()
  writeback: show bdi write bandwidth in debugfs
  writeback: bdi write bandwidth estimation
  writeback: account per-bdi accumulated written pages
  writeback: make writeback_control.nr_to_write straight
  writeback: skip tmpfs early in balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr()
  writeback: trace event writeback_queue_io
  writeback: trace event writeback_single_inode
  writeback: remove .nonblocking and .encountered_congestion
  writeback: remove writeback_control.more_io
  writeback: skip balance_dirty_pages() for in-memory fs
  writeback: add bdi_dirty_limit() kernel-doc
  writeback: avoid extra sync work at enqueue time
  writeback: elevate queue_io() into wb_writeback()
  ...

Fix up trivial conflicts in fs/fs-writeback.c and mm/filemap.c
2011-07-26 10:39:54 -07:00
Wu Fengguang 99b12e3d88 writeback: account NR_WRITTEN at IO completion time
NR_WRITTEN is now accounted at block IO enqueue time, which is not very
accurate as to common understanding.  This moves NR_WRITTEN accounting to
the IO completion time and makes it more consistent with BDI_WRITTEN,
which is used for bandwidth estimation.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-07-25 20:57:11 -07:00