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2009-04-03Document the slow work thread poolDavid Howells
Document the slow work thread pool. Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com> Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com> Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>
2009-04-03Make the slow work pool configurableDavid Howells
Make the slow work pool configurable through /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work. (*) /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work/min-threads The minimum number of threads that should be in the pool as long as it is in use. This may be anywhere between 2 and max-threads. (*) /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work/max-threads The maximum number of threads that should in the pool. This may be anywhere between min-threads and 255 or NR_CPUS * 2, whichever is greater. (*) /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work/vslow-percentage The percentage of active threads in the pool that may be used to execute very slow work items. This may be between 1 and 99. The resultant number is bounded to between 1 and one fewer than the number of active threads. This ensures there is always at least one thread that can process very slow work items, and always at least one thread that won't. Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com> Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com> Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com> Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>
2009-04-03Make slow-work thread pool actually dynamicDavid Howells
Make the slow-work thread pool actually dynamic in the number of threads it contains. With this patch, it will both create additional threads when it has extra work to do, and cull excess threads that aren't doing anything. Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com> Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com> Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com> Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>
2009-04-03Create a dynamically sized pool of threads for doing very slow work itemsDavid Howells
Create a dynamically sized pool of threads for doing very slow work items, such as invoking mkdir() or rmdir() - things that may take a long time and may sleep, holding mutexes/semaphores and hogging a thread, and are thus unsuitable for workqueues. The number of threads is always at least a settable minimum, but more are started when there's more work to do, up to a limit. Because of the nature of the load, it's not suitable for a 1-thread-per-CPU type pool. A system with one CPU may well want several threads. This is used by FS-Cache to do slow caching operations in the background, such as looking up, creating or deleting cache objects. Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com> Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com> Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com> Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>