linux-ext4 - Re: Query about DIO/AIO WRITE throttling and ext4 serialization

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Date:	Fri, 3 Jun 2011 09:51:53 +1000
From:	Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
To:	Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com>
Cc:	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Query about DIO/AIO WRITE throttling and ext4 serialization

On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 11:56:10AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 10:36:33AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 10:17:16AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 11:22:09AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 05:50:49PM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > > > > Hi,
> > > > > 
> > > > > If I throttle a DIO/AIO WRITE bio at block device in a cgroup, will it
> > > > > lead to any kind of serialization of ext4 file system. IOW, is there any
> > > > > filesystem operation which will wait for that DIO/AIO WRITE to finish
> > > > > before other filesystem can make progress (fsync, journalling etc?)
> > > > 
> > > > Truncate?
> > > > 
> > > > (XFS explicitly serialises truncate against in flight DIO,
> > > > regardless of whether ext4 does.)
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Dave,
> > > 
> > > Does this serialization happens against that particular inode on which
> > > truncate has been called? If yes, then I think I will still be fine
> > > as in common use case I am not expecting much sharing of inodes across
> > > cgroups.
> > 
> > Dave,
> > 
> > I did a quick test of throttling a direct IO on one file and then
> > doing "truncate -s 40 testfile" on a different file in different
> > cgroup and it seems to work fine.
> > 
> > But I seem to be having issues with "sync". Looks like in ext4, if
> > I throttle a DIO, sync does not hang but in XFS it does. I am 
> > wondering if XFS is waiting for all inflight DIO to finish before
> > sync completes.
> 
> "sync" on XFS seems to be livelocking as long as DIO write operation
> is going on and same does not happen on ext4.
> 
> I ran "aio-stress -O aiofile1 -s 4G" and in other window I did "sync"
> and it does not finish untile and unless aio-stress has finished.
> On the other hand ext4 seems to be fine and it does finish earlier.

On XFS sync waits for the IO count on each inode to return to zero
before continuing.  If you are blasting concurrent AIO/DIO at a
file, then it is possible that the IO count never falls to zero.
It's questionable whether this is necessary, but ISTR that the
current behaviour has been there for a long time (though morphed
about a bit in implementation).

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@...morbit.com
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