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authorWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>2011-06-19 22:18:42 -0600
committerWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>2011-07-09 22:09:02 -0700
commitffd1f609ab10532e8137b4b981fdf903ef4d0b32 (patch)
treeb691e22952a8d12782cc73ec21e7aa450859cf4f /include/linux/writeback.h
parentc42843f2f0bbc9d716a32caf667d18fc2bf3bc4c (diff)
writeback: introduce max-pause and pass-good dirty limits
The max-pause limit helps to keep the sleep time inside balance_dirty_pages() within MAX_PAUSE=200ms. The 200ms max sleep means per task rate limit of 8pages/200ms=160KB/s when dirty exceeded, which normally is enough to stop dirtiers from continue pushing the dirty pages high, unless there are a sufficient large number of slow dirtiers (eg. 500 tasks doing 160KB/s will still sum up to 80MB/s, exceeding the write bandwidth of a slow disk and hence accumulating more and more dirty pages). The pass-good limit helps to let go of the good bdi's in the presence of a blocked bdi (ie. NFS server not responding) or slow USB disk which for some reason build up a large number of initial dirty pages that refuse to go away anytime soon. For example, given two bdi's A and B and the initial state bdi_thresh_A = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2 Then A get blocked, after a dozen seconds bdi_thresh_A = 0 bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2 The (bdi_dirty_B < bdi_thresh_B) test is now useless and the dirty pages will be effectively throttled by condition (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh). This has two problems: (1) we lose the protections for light dirtiers (2) balance_dirty_pages() effectively becomes IO-less because the (bdi_nr_reclaimable > bdi_thresh) test won't be true. This is good for IO, but balance_dirty_pages() loses an important way to break out of the loop which leads to more spread out throttle delays. DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA can eliminate the above issues. The only problem is, DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA needs to be defined as 2 to fully cover the above example while this patch uses the more conservative value 8 so as not to surprise people with too many dirty pages than expected. The max-pause limit won't noticeably impact the speed dirty pages are knocked down when there is a sudden drop of global/bdi dirty thresholds. Because the heavy dirties will be throttled below 160KB/s which is slow enough. It does help to avoid long dirty throttle delays and especially will make light dirtiers more responsive. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux/writeback.h')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/writeback.h21
1 files changed, 21 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/writeback.h b/include/linux/writeback.h
index e9d371b6053b..b625073b80c8 100644
--- a/include/linux/writeback.h
+++ b/include/linux/writeback.h
@@ -7,6 +7,27 @@
#include <linux/sched.h>
#include <linux/fs.h>
+/*
+ * The 1/16 region above the global dirty limit will be put to maximum pauses:
+ *
+ * (limit, limit + limit/DIRTY_MAXPAUSE_AREA)
+ *
+ * The 1/16 region above the max-pause region, dirty exceeded bdi's will be put
+ * to loops:
+ *
+ * (limit + limit/DIRTY_MAXPAUSE_AREA, limit + limit/DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA)
+ *
+ * Further beyond, all dirtier tasks will enter a loop waiting (possibly long
+ * time) for the dirty pages to drop, unless written enough pages.
+ *
+ * The global dirty threshold is normally equal to the global dirty limit,
+ * except when the system suddenly allocates a lot of anonymous memory and
+ * knocks down the global dirty threshold quickly, in which case the global
+ * dirty limit will follow down slowly to prevent livelocking all dirtier tasks.
+ */
+#define DIRTY_MAXPAUSE_AREA 16
+#define DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA 8
+
struct backing_dev_info;
/*