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Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:30:16 +0800
From: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@...el.com>
To: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>
Cc: Peter Staubach <staubach@...hat.com>,
Myklebust Trond <Trond.Myklebust@...app.com>,
Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
Theodore Tso <tytso@....edu>,
Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>,
Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>,
"Li, Shaohua" <shaohua.li@...el.com>,
"jens.axboe@...cle.com" <jens.axboe@...cle.com>,
Nick Piggin <npiggin@...e.de>,
"linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
Richard Kennedy <richard@....demon.co.uk>,
LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 01/45] writeback: reduce calls to global_page_state in
balance_dirty_pages()
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 07:22:28PM +0800, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 09:38 +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > > > Hmm, probably you've discussed this in some other email but why do we
> > > > cycle in this loop until we get below dirty limit? We used to leave the
> > > > loop after writing write_chunk... So the time we spend in
> > > > balance_dirty_pages() is no longer limited, right?
> >
> > Right, this is a legitimate concern.
>
> Quite.
>
> > > Wu was saying that without the loop nr_writeback wasn't limited, but
> > > since bdi_writeback_wakeup() is driven from writeout completion, I'm not
> > > sure how again that was so.
> >
> > Let me summarize the ideas :)
> >
> > There are two cases:
> >
> > - there are no bdi or block io queue to limit nr_writeback
> > This must be fixed. It either let nr_writeback grow to dirty_thresh
> > (with loop) and thus squeeze nr_dirty, or grow out of control
> > totally (without loop). Current state is, the nr_writeback wait
> > queue for NFS is there; the one for btrfs is still missing.
> >
> > - there is a nr_writeback limit, but is larger than dirty_thresh
> > In this case nr_dirty will be close to 0 regardless of the loop.
> > The loop will help to keep
> > nr_dirty + nr_writeback + nr_unstable < dirty_thresh
> > Without the loop, the "real" dirty threshold would be larger
> > (determined by the nr_writeback limit).
> >
> > > We can move all of bdi_dirty to bdi_writeout, if the bdi writeout queue
> > > permits, but it cannot grow beyond the total limit, since we're actually
> > > waiting for writeout completion.
> >
> > Yes, this explains the second case. It's some trade-off like: the
> > nr_writeback limit can not be trusted in small memory systems, so do
> > the loop to impose the dirty_thresh, which unfortunately can hurt
> > responsiveness on all systems with prolonged wait time..
>
> Ok, so I'm still puzzled.
Big sorry - it's me that was confused (by some buggy tests).
> set_page_dirty()
> balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited()
> balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr(1)
> balance_dirty_pages(nr);
>
> So we call balance_dirty_pages() with an appropriate count for each
> set_page_dirty() successful invocation, right?
Right.
> balance_dirty_pages() guarantees that:
>
> nr_dirty + nr_writeback + nr_unstable < dirty_thresh &&
> (nr_dirty + nr_writeback + nr_unstable <
> (dirty_thresh + background_thresh)/2 ||
> bdi_dirty + bdi_writeback + bdi_unstable < bdi_thresh)
>
> Now without loop, without writeback limit, I still see no way to
> actually generate more 'dirty' pages than dirty_thresh.
>
> As soon as we hit dirty_thresh a process will wait for exactly the same
> amount of pages to get cleaned (writeback completed) as were dirtied
> (+/- the ratelimit fuzz which should even out over processes).
Ah yes, we now wait for writeback _completed_ in bdi_writeback_wait(),
instead of _start_ writeback in the old fashioned writeback_inodes().
> That should bound things to dirty_thresh -- the wait is on writeback
> complete, so nr_writeback is bounded too.
Right. It was not bounded in the tests because bdi_writeback_wait()
quits _prematurely_, because the background writeback finds it was
already under background threshold, and so wakeup the throttled tasks
and then quit. Fixed by simply removing the wakeup-all in background
writeback and this change:
if (args->for_background && !over_bground_thresh() &&
+ list_empty(&wb->bdi->throttle_list))
break;
So now
- the throttled tasks are guaranteed to be wakeup
- it will only be wakeup in __bdi_writeout_inc()
- once wakeup, at least write_chunk pages have been written on behalf of it
> [ I forgot the exact semantics of unstable, if we clear writeback before
> unstable, we need to fix something ]
New tests show that NFS is working fine without loop and without NFS
nr_writeback limit:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test/zero3 bs=1M count=200 &
$ vmmon -d 1 nr_writeback nr_dirty nr_unstable
nr_writeback nr_dirty nr_unstable
0 2 0
0 2 0
0 22477 65
2 20849 1697
2 19153 3393
2 17420 5126
27825 7 5979
27816 0 41
26925 0 907
31064 286 159
32531 0 213
32548 0 89
32405 0 155
32464 0 98
32517 0 45
32560 0 194
32534 0 220
32601 0 222
32490 0 72
32447 0 115
32511 0 48
32535 0 216
32535 0 216
32535 0 216
32535 0 216
31555 0 1180
29732 0 3003
29277 0 3458
27721 0 5014
25955 0 6780
24356 0 8379
22763 0 9972
21083 0 11652
19371 0 13364
17564 0 15171
15781 0 16954
14005 0 18730
12230 0 20505
12177 0 20558
11383 0 21352
9489 0 23246
7621 0 25115
5866 0 26870
4790 0 27947
2962 0 29773
1089 0 31646
0 0 32735
0 0 32735
0 0 0
0 0 0
> Now, a nr_writeback queue that limits writeback will still be useful,
> esp for high speed devices. Once they ramp up and bdi_thresh exceeds the
> queue size, it'll take effect. So you reap the benefits when needed.
Right, the nr_writeback limit avoids
nr_writeback => dirty_thresh
+
nr_dirty + nr_writeback < dirty_thresh
=>
nr_dirty => 0
Thanks for the clarification, it looks less obscure now :)
Thanks,
Fengguang
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