linux-kernel - Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty

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Message-Id: <20070928121642.56a380ce.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date:	Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:16:42 -0700
From:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>
Cc:	Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no>,
	Chakri n <chakriin5@...il.com>,
	linux-pm <linux-pm@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
	lkml <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, nfs@...ts.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on
 linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 20:48:59 +0200 Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl> wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 11:49 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > Do you know where the stalls are occurring?  throttle_vm_writeout(), or via
> > direct calls to congestion_wait() from page_alloc.c and vmscan.c?  (running
> > sysrq-w five or ten times will probably be enough to determine this)
> 
> would it make sense to instrument congestion_wait() callsites with
> vmstats?

Better than nothing, but it isn't a great fit: we'd need one vmstat counter
per congestion_wait() callsite, and it's all rather specific to the
kernel-of-the-day.

taskstats delay accounting isn't useful either - it will aggregate all the
schedule() callsites.

profile=sleep is just about ideal for this, isn't it?  I suspect that most
people don't know it's there, or forgot about it.

It could be that profile=sleep just tells us "you're spending a lot of time
in io_schedule()" or congestion_wait(), so perhaps we need to teach it to
go for walk up the stack somehow.

But lockdep knows how to do that already so perhaps we (ie: you ;)) can
bolt sleep instrumentation onto lockdep as we (ie you ;)) did with the
lockstat stuff?

(Searches for the lockstat documentation)

Did we forget to do that?
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