cb357bf3d1
When scheduling writeback of dirty file data in the page cache, XFS uses IO completion workqueue items to ensure that filesystem metadata only updates after the write completes successfully. This is essential for converting unwritten extents to real extents at the right time and performing COW remappings. Unfortunately, XFS queues each IO completion work item to an unbounded workqueue, which means that the kernel can spawn dozens of threads to try to handle the items quickly. These threads need to take the ILOCK to update file metadata, which results in heavy ILOCK contention if a large number of the work items target a single file, which is inefficient. Worse yet, the writeback completion threads get stuck waiting for the ILOCK while holding transaction reservations, which can use up all available log reservation space. When that happens, metadata updates to other parts of the filesystem grind to a halt, even if the filesystem could otherwise have handled it. Even worse, if one of the things grinding to a halt happens to be a thread in the middle of a defer-ops finish holding the same ILOCK and trying to obtain more log reservation having exhausted the permanent reservation, we now have an ABBA deadlock - writeback completion has a transaction reserved and wants the ILOCK, and someone else has the ILOCK and wants a transaction reservation. Therefore, we create a per-inode writeback io completion queue + work item. When writeback finishes, it can add the ioend to the per-inode queue and let the single worker item process that queue. This dramatically cuts down on the number of kworkers and ILOCK contention in the system, and seems to have eliminated an occasional deadlock I was seeing while running generic/476. Testing with a program that simulates a heavy random-write workload to a single file demonstrates that the number of kworkers drops from approximately 120 threads per file to 1, without dramatically changing write bandwidth or pagecache access latency. Note that we leave the xfs-conv workqueue's max_active alone because we still want to be able to run ioend processing for as many inodes as the system can handle. Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com> Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com> |
||
|---|---|---|
| arch | ||
| block | ||
| certs | ||
| crypto | ||
| Documentation | ||
| drivers | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| LICENSES | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.