linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] loop: Limit the number of requests in the bio list

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Date:	Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:52:19 -0400
From:	Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@...hat.com>
To:	Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com>
Cc:	Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Dave Chinner <dchinner@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] loop: Limit the number of requests in the bio list

Lukas Czerner <lczerner@...hat.com> writes:

> Currently there is not limitation of number of requests in the loop bio
> list. This can lead into some nasty situations when the caller spawns
> tons of bio requests taking huge amount of memory. This is even more
> obvious with discard where blkdev_issue_discard() will submit all bios
> for the range and wait for them to finish afterwards. On really big loop
> devices this can lead to OOM situation as reported by Dave Chinner.
>
> With this patch we will wait in loop_make_request() if the number of
> bios in the loop bio list would exceed 'nr_requests' number of requests.
> We'll wake up the process as we process the bios form the list.

I think you might want to do something similar to what is done for
request_queues by implementing a congestion on and off threshold.  As
Jens writes in this commit (predating the conversion to git):

Author: Jens Axboe <axboe@...e.de>
Date:   Wed Nov 3 15:47:37 2004 -0800

    [PATCH] queue congestion threshold hysteresis
    
    We need to open the gap between congestion on/off a little bit, or
    we risk burning many cycles continually putting processes on a wait
    queue only to wake them up again immediately. This was observed with
    CFQ at least, which showed way excessive sys time.
    
    Patch is from Arjan.
    
    Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@...e.de>
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...l.org>

If you feel this isn't necessary, then I think you at least need to
justify it with testing.  Perhaps Jens can shed some light on the exact
workload that triggered the pathological behaviour.

Cheers,
Jeff
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