linux/include
Jens Axboe aac8d41cd4 writeback: only allow one inflight and pending full flush
When someone calls wakeup_flusher_threads() or
wakeup_flusher_threads_bdi(), they schedule writeback of all dirty
pages in the system (or on that bdi). If we are tight on memory, we
can get tons of these queued from kswapd/vmscan. This causes (at
least) two problems:

1) We consume a ton of memory just allocating writeback work items.
   We've seen as much as 600 million of these writeback work items
   pending. That's a lot of memory to pointlessly hold hostage,
   while the box is under memory pressure.

2) We spend so much time processing these work items, that we
   introduce a softlockup in writeback processing. This is because
   each of the writeback work items don't end up doing any work (it's
   hard when you have millions of identical ones coming in to the
   flush machinery), so we just sit in a tight loop pulling work
   items and deleting/freeing them.

Fix this by adding a 'start_all' bit to the writeback structure, and
set that when someone attempts to flush all dirty pages. The bit is
cleared when we start writeback on that work item. If the bit is
already set when we attempt to queue !nr_pages writeback, then we
simply ignore it.

This provides us one full flush in flight, with one pending as well,
and makes for more efficient handling of this type of writeback.

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Tested-by: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-03 08:38:17 -06:00
..
acpi ACPI / bus: Make ACPI_HANDLE() work for non-GPL code again 2017-09-19 22:42:31 +02:00
asm-generic Merge branch 'work.misc' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2017-09-14 20:01:41 -07:00
clocksource
crypto crypto: hash - add crypto_(un)register_ahashes() 2017-08-22 14:54:52 +08:00
drm lib/interval_tree: fast overlap detection 2017-09-08 18:26:49 -07:00
dt-bindings Merge branch '4.14-features' of git://git.linux-mips.org/pub/scm/ralf/upstream-linus 2017-09-15 20:43:33 -07:00
keys net: rxrpc: Replace time_t type with time64_t type 2017-08-29 10:16:00 +01:00
kvm
linux writeback: only allow one inflight and pending full flush 2017-10-03 08:38:17 -06:00
math-emu
media media updates for v4.14-rc1 2017-09-07 12:53:14 -07:00
memory
misc
net net: prevent dst uses after free 2017-09-21 20:42:15 -07:00
pcmcia
ras
rdma More RDMA work and some op-structure constification from Chuck Lever, 2017-09-09 13:31:49 -07:00
scsi SCSI misc on 20170913 2017-09-13 10:47:14 -07:00
soc ARM: SoC driver updates for v4.14 2017-09-10 20:40:00 -07:00
sound sound updates for 4.14-rc1 2017-09-07 12:44:53 -07:00
target
trace Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2017-09-16 11:28:59 -07:00
uapi Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2017-09-23 05:41:27 -10:00
video
xen xen, arm64: drop dummy lookup_address() 2017-09-19 09:25:05 -04:00