There's an inherent mismatch between memcg and writeback. The former
trackes ownership per-page while the latter per-inode. This was a
deliberate design decision because honoring per-page ownership in the
writeback path is complicated, may lead to higher CPU and IO overheads
and deemed unnecessary given that write-sharing an inode across
different cgroups isn't a common use-case.
Combined with inode majority-writer ownership switching, this works
well enough in most cases but there are some pathological cases. For
example, let's say there are two cgroups A and B which keep writing to
different but confined parts of the same inode. B owns the inode and
A's memory is limited far below B's. A's dirty ratio can rise enough
to trigger balance_dirty_pages() sleeps but B's can be low enough to
avoid triggering background writeback. A will be slowed down without
a way to make writeback of the dirty pages happen.
This patch implements foreign dirty recording and foreign mechanism so
that when a memcg encounters a condition as above it can trigger
flushes on bdi_writebacks which can clean its pages. Please see the
comment on top of mem_cgroup_track_foreign_dirty_slowpath() for
details.
A reproducer follows.
write-range.c::
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
static const char *usage = "write-range FILE START SIZE\n";
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int fd;
unsigned long start, size, end, pos;
char *endp;
char buf[4096];
if (argc < 4) {
fprintf(stderr, usage);
return 1;
}
fd = open(argv[1], O_WRONLY);
if (fd < 0) {
perror("open");
return 1;
}
start = strtoul(argv[2], &endp, 0);
if (*endp != '\0') {
fprintf(stderr, usage);
return 1;
}
size = strtoul(argv[3], &endp, 0);
if (*endp != '\0') {
fprintf(stderr, usage);
return 1;
}
end = start + size;
while (1) {
for (pos = start; pos < end; ) {
long bread, bwritten = 0;
if (lseek(fd, pos, SEEK_SET) < 0) {
perror("lseek");
return 1;
}
bread = read(0, buf, sizeof(buf) < end - pos ?
sizeof(buf) : end - pos);
if (bread < 0) {
perror("read");
return 1;
}
if (bread == 0)
return 0;
while (bwritten < bread) {
long this;
this = write(fd, buf + bwritten,
bread - bwritten);
if (this < 0) {
perror("write");
return 1;
}
bwritten += this;
pos += bwritten;
}
}
}
}
repro.sh::
#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -x
sysctl -w vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=300000
sysctl -w vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=300000
sysctl -w vm.dirtytime_expire_seconds=300000
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
TEST=/sys/fs/cgroup/test
A=$TEST/A
B=$TEST/B
mkdir -p $A $B
echo "+memory +io" > $TEST/cgroup.subtree_control
echo $((1<<30)) > $A/memory.high
echo $((32<<30)) > $B/memory.high
rm -f testfile
touch testfile
fallocate -l 4G testfile
echo "Starting B"
(echo $BASHPID > $B/cgroup.procs
pv -q --rate-limit 70M < /dev/urandom | ./write-range testfile $((2<<30)) $((2<<30))) &
echo "Waiting 10s to ensure B claims the testfile inode"
sleep 5
sync
sleep 5
sync
echo "Starting A"
(echo $BASHPID > $A/cgroup.procs
pv < /dev/urandom | ./write-range testfile 0 $((2<<30)))
v2: Added comments explaining why the specific intervals are being used.
v3: Use 0 @nr when calling cgroup_writeback_by_id() to use best-effort
flushing while avoding possible livelocks.
v4: Use get_jiffies_64() and time_before/after64() instead of raw
jiffies_64 and arthimetic comparisons as suggested by Jan.
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
97b27821b4