Date:   Fri, 1 Dec 2017 13:33:22 -0800
From:   vcaputo@...garu.com
To:     linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Cc:     timmurray@...gle.com, tj@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [REGRESSION] (>= v4.12) IO w/dmcrypt causing audio underruns

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 10:39:19AM -0800, vcaputo@...garu.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Recently I noticed substantial audio dropouts when listening to MP3s in
> `cmus` while doing big and churny `git checkout` commands in my linux git
> tree.
> 
> It's not something I've done much of over the last couple months so I
> hadn't noticed until yesterday, but didn't remember this being a problem in
> recent history.
> 
> As there's quite an accumulation of similarly configured and built kernels
> in my grub menu, it was trivial to determine approximately when this began:
> 
> 4.11.0: no dropouts
> 4.12.0-rc7: dropouts
> 4.14.0-rc6: dropouts (seem more substantial as well, didn't investigate)
> 
> Watching top while this is going on in the various kernel versions, it's
> apparent that the kworker behavior changed.  Both the priority and quantity
> of running kworker threads is elevated in kernels experiencing dropouts.
> 
> Searching through the commit history for v4.11..v4.12 uncovered:
> 
> commit a1b89132dc4f61071bdeaab92ea958e0953380a1
> Author: Tim Murray <timmurray@...gle.com>
> Date:   Fri Apr 21 11:11:36 2017 +0200
> 
>     dm crypt: use WQ_HIGHPRI for the IO and crypt workqueues
>     
>     Running dm-crypt with workqueues at the standard priority results in IO
>     competing for CPU time with standard user apps, which can lead to
>     pipeline bubbles and seriously degraded performance.  Move to using
>     WQ_HIGHPRI workqueues to protect against that.
>     
>     Signed-off-by: Tim Murray <timmurray@...gle.com>
>     Signed-off-by: Enric Balletbo i Serra <enric.balletbo@...labora.com>
>     Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@...hat.com>
> 
> ---
> 
> Reverting a1b8913 from 4.14.0-rc6, my current kernel, eliminates the
> problem completely.
> 
> Looking at the diff in that commit, it looks like the commit message isn't
> even accurate; not only is the priority of the dmcrypt workqueues being
> changed - they're also being made "CPU intensive" workqueues as well.
> 
> This combination appears to result in both elevated scheduling priority and
> greater quantity of participant worker threads effectively starving any
> normal priority user task under periods of heavy IO on dmcrypt volumes.
> 
> I don't know what the right solution is here.  It seems to me we're lacking
> the appropriate mechanism for charging CPU resources consumed on behalf of
> user processes in kworker threads to the work-causing process.
> 
> What effectively happens is my normal `git` user process is able to
> greatly amplify what share of CPU it takes from the system by generating IO
> on what happens to be a high-priority CPU-intensive storage volume.
> 
> It looks potentially complicated to fix properly, but I suspect at its core
> this may be a fairly longstanding shortcoming of the page cache and its
> asynchronous design.  Something that has been exacerbated substantially by
> the introduction of CPU-intensive storage subsystems like dmcrypt.
> 
> If we imagine the whole stack simplified, where all the IO was being done
> synchronously in-band, and the dmcrypt kernel code simply ran in the
> IO-causing process context, it would be getting charged to the calling
> process and scheduled accordingly.  The resource accounting and scheduling
> problems all emerge with the page cache, buffered IO, and async background
> writeback in a pool of unrelated worker threads, etc.  That's how it
> appears to me anyways...
> 
> The system used is a X61s Thinkpad 1.8Ghz with 840 EVO SSD, lvm on dmcrypt.
> The kernel .config is attached in case it's of interest.
> 
> Thanks,
> Vito Caputo



Ping...

Could somebody please at least ACK receiving this so I'm not left wondering
if my mails to lkml are somehow winding up flagged as spam, thanks!

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