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 <psz@maths.usyd.edu.au>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
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>
This provides a band-aid to provide stable page writes on jbd without
needing to backport the fixed locking and page writeback bit handling
schemes of jbd2. The band-aid works by using bounce buffers to snapshot
page contents instead of waiting.
For those wondering about the ext3 bandage -- fixing the jbd locking
(which was done as part of ext4dev years ago) is a lot of surgery, and
setting PG_writeback on data pages when we actually hold the page lock
dropped ext3 performance by nearly an order of magnitude. If we're
going to migrate iscsi and raid to use stable page writes, the
complaints about high latency will likely return. We might as well
centralize their page snapshotting thing to one place.
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Tested-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>
Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich@sandia.gov>
Cc: Latchesar Ionkov <lucho@ionkov.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Create a helper function to check if a backing device requires stable
page writes and, if so, performs the necessary wait. Then, make it so
that all points in the memory manager that handle making pages writable
use the helper function. This should provide stable page write support
to most filesystems, while eliminating unnecessary waiting for devices
that don't require the feature.
Before this patchset, all filesystems would block, regardless of whether
or not it was necessary. ext3 would wait, but still generate occasional
checksum errors. The network filesystems were left to do their own
thing, so they'd wait too.
After this patchset, all the disk filesystems except ext3 and btrfs will
wait only if the hardware requires it. ext3 (if necessary) snapshots
pages instead of blocking, and btrfs provides its own bdi so the mm will
never wait. Network filesystems haven't been touched, so either they
provide their own stable page guarantees or they don't block at all.
The blocking behavior is back to what it was before 3.0 if you don't
have a disk requiring stable page writes.
Here's the result of using dbench to test latency on ext2:
3.8.0-rc3:
Operation Count AvgLat MaxLat
----------------------------------------
WriteX 109347 0.028 59.817
ReadX 347180 0.004 3.391
Flush 15514 29.828 287.283
Throughput 57.429 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=287.290 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 105556 0.029 4.273
ReadX 335004 0.005 4.112
Flush 14982 30.540 298.634
Throughput 55.4496 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=298.650 ms
As you can see, the maximum write latency drops considerably with this
patch enabled. The other filesystems (ext3/ext4/xfs/btrfs) behave
similarly, but see the cover letter for those results.
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com>
Cc: Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>
Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich@sandia.gov>
Cc: Latchesar Ionkov <lucho@ionkov.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Move rt scheduler definitions out of include/linux/sched.h into
new file include/linux/sched/rt.h
Signed-off-by: Clark Williams <williams@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20130207094707.7b9f825f@riff.lan
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
The system uses global_dirtyable_memory() to calculate number of
dirtyable pages/pages that can be allocated to the page cache. A bug
causes an underflow thus making the page count look like a big unsigned
number. This in turn confuses the dirty writeback throttling to
aggressively write back pages as they become dirty (usually 1 page at a
time). This generally only affects systems with highmem because the
underflowed count gets subtracted from the global count of dirtyable
memory.
The problem was introduced with v3.2-4896-gab8fabd
Fix is to ensure we don't get an underflowed total of either highmem or
global dirtyable memory.
Signed-off-by: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Puneet Kumar <puneetster@chromium.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Tested-by: Damien Wyart <damien.wyart@free.fr>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
There is no reason to pass the nr_pages_dirtied argument, because
nr_pages_dirtied value from the caller is unused in
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr().
Signed-off-by: Namjae Jeon <linkinjeon@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Vivek Trivedi <vtrivedi018@gmail.com>
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>
The CPU hotplug callback related to writeback calls writeback_set_ratelimit()
during every state change in the hotplug sequence. This is unnecessary
since num_online_cpus() changes only once during the entire hotplug operation.
So invoke the function only once per hotplug, thereby avoiding the
unnecessary repetition of those costly calculations.
Signed-off-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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
...
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
* '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
* '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
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>
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>
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>
Useful for analyzing the dynamics of the throttling algorithms and
debugging user reported problems.
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
Paul Szabo