Since the dawn of time, our background buffered writeback has sucked. When we do background buffered writeback, it should have little impact on foreground activity. That's the definition of background activity... But for as long as I can remember, heavy buffered writers have not behaved like that. For instance, if I do something like this:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1M count=10k on my laptop, and then try and start chrome, it basically won't start before the buffered writeback is done. Or, for server oriented workloads, where installation of a big RPM (or similar) adversely impacts database reads or sync writes. When that happens, I get people yelling at me. Results from some recent testing can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/axboe/posts/10154074651342933 See previous postings for a bigger description of the patchset. Find the code here: git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block.git wb-buf-throttle Note that I rebase this branch when I collapse patches. The wb-buf-throttle-v8 will remain the same as this version. I know there are a bunch of folks running this patchset with success, and to that end, I'm providing 4.6/4.7/4.8 versions of the patchset as well. IMHO, this series is ready to be merged. It's possible to disable the code through Kconfig options, or just enable it on blk-mq alone, for instance. The latter is interesting since we don't have any IO scheduling for blk-mq. A full patch against 4.9-rc2 can be found here: http://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/wb-buf-throttle-v8.patch And 4.6/7/8 versions: http://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/wb-buf-throttle-v4.6.patch http://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/wb-buf-throttle-v4.7.patch http://brick.kernel.dk/snaps/wb-buf-throttle-v4.8.patch Changes since v7 - Handle kswapd writeback a bit differently, so we don't start it with buffered writes. This solved some allocation stall issues that we have been seeing internally at Facebook. - (Only in the 4.9 series) Drop the generic bits, just make it block specific. If we want to add this to NFS or in other places, it's easy enough to make it generic again. For getting this merged, I wanted to keep the footprint lower instead and exclusive to block. - (Only in the 4.9 series) Add Kconfig options to enable this feature, and whether to enable it on single queue, multiqueue, or both. Changes since v6 - Improve performance of the stats tracking, by reducing int divisions through batching. - Make blk_mq_stat_get() correctly set the right stat time window. Use this through the ->is_current() stat op. - Change the balance_dirty_pages() triggered 'dirty_sleeping' atomic into a time stamp. Use this in the throttling code to know if someone has slept in bdp() recently, instead of only knowing if a task is block there right now. - Allow negative scaling. This allows us to have a tighter baseline setting for better latencies, while allowing us to go a bit deeper in queue depth for improved write performance for cases where we don't have a mixed workload. - Add a wbt timer trace point. - Changing tracing from nanoseconds to microseconds, with the base noted. - Added/improved code commenting. - Fix the bug in wbc_to_write_flags(). Spotted by Omar. - Kill the unused SCALE_BITMAP Kconfig setting. Spotted by Omar. - Rebased to v4.8-rc5 Changes since v5 - Rebased on top of 4.8-rc4, drop parts of the series that is now in mainline. - Fixes for QD=1 devices, should make them perform better. - Fix for hang with disabling WBT with IO in flight - Change in the sync issue/completion logic. Previously we used whether this IO was tracked or not (eg was a buffered write), this has now been changed to just look at reads. This is a better metric, and should improve behavior. - Add some more comments to the code, explaining how it works. Changes since v4 - Add some documentation for the two queue sysfs files - Kill off wb_stats sysfs file. Use the trace points to get this info now. - Various work around making this block layer agnostic. The main code now resides in lib/wbt.c and can be plugged into NFS as well, for instance. - Fix an issue with double completions on the block layer side. - Fix an issue where a long sync issue was disregarded, if the stat sample weren't valid. - Speed up the division in rwb_arm_timer(). - Add logic to scale back up for 'unknown' latency events. - Don't track sync issue timestamp of wbt is disabled. - Drop the dirty/writeback page inc/dec patch. We don't need it, and it was racy. - Move block/blk-wb.c to lib/wbt.c Changes since v3 - Re-do the mm/ writheback parts. Add REQ_BG for background writes, and don't overload the wbc 'reason' for writeback decisions. - Add tracking for when apps are sleeping waiting for a page to complete. - Change wbc_to_write() to wbc_to_write_cmd(). - Use atomic_t for the balance_dirty_pages() sleep count. - Add a basic scalable block stats tracking framework. - Rewrite blk-wb core as described above, to dynamically adapt. This is a big change, see the last patch for a full description of it. - Add tracing to blk-wb, instead of using debug printk's. - Rebased to 4.6-rc3 (ish) Changes since v2 - Switch from wb_depth to wb_percent, as that's an easier tunable. - Add the patch to track device depth on the block layer side. - Cleanup the limiting code. - Don't use a fixed limit in the wb wait, since it can change between wakeups. - Minor tweaks, fixups, cleanups. Changes since v1 - Drop sync() WB_SYNC_NONE -> WB_SYNC_ALL change - wb_start_writeback() fills in background/reclaim/sync info in the writeback work, based on writeback reason. - Use WRITE_SYNC for reclaim/sync IO - Split balance_dirty_pages() sleep change into separate patch - Drop get_request() u64 flag change, set the bit on the request directly after-the-fact. - Fix wrong sysfs return value - Various small cleanups Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt | 13 block/Kconfig | 24 + block/Makefile | 3 block/blk-core.c | 22 + block/blk-mq-sysfs.c | 47 ++ block/blk-mq.c | 41 +- block/blk-mq.h | 3 block/blk-settings.c | 16 block/blk-stat.c | 226 +++++++++++ block/blk-stat.h | 37 + block/blk-sysfs.c | 160 ++++++++ block/blk-wbt.c | 704 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ block/blk-wbt.h | 166 ++++++++ block/cfq-iosched.c | 14 drivers/scsi/scsi.c | 3 fs/buffer.c | 2 fs/f2fs/data.c | 2 fs/f2fs/node.c | 2 fs/gfs2/meta_io.c | 3 fs/mpage.c | 2 fs/xfs/xfs_aops.c | 7 include/linux/backing-dev-defs.h | 2 include/linux/blk_types.h | 20 - include/linux/blkdev.h | 18 include/linux/fs.h | 3 include/linux/writeback.h | 10 include/trace/events/wbt.h | 153 +++++++ mm/backing-dev.c | 1 mm/page-writeback.c | 1 29 files changed, 1689 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-) -- Jens Axboe
