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authorMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>2016-10-08 02:58:12 +0300
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2016-10-08 04:46:27 +0300
commitbf48438354a79df50fadd2e1c0b81baa2619a8b6 (patch)
tree8e175f70daf4763c87b468acbc36ab3463e0851f /include/linux/writeback.h
parente780149bcd4be171421535db0514fa9ff556cb87 (diff)
downloadlinux-bf48438354a79df50fadd2e1c0b81baa2619a8b6.tar.xz
mm, vmscan: get rid of throttle_vm_writeout
throttle_vm_writeout() was introduced back in 2005 to fix OOMs caused by excessive pageout activity during the reclaim. Too many pages could be put under writeback therefore LRUs would be full of unreclaimable pages until the IO completes and in turn the OOM killer could be invoked. There have been some important changes introduced since then in the reclaim path though. Writers are throttled by balance_dirty_pages when initiating the buffered IO and later during the memory pressure, the direct reclaim is throttled by wait_iff_congested if the node is considered congested by dirty pages on LRUs and the underlying bdi is congested by the queued IO. The kswapd is throttled as well if it encounters pages marked for immediate reclaim or under writeback which signals that that there are too many pages under writeback already. Finally should_reclaim_retry does congestion_wait if the reclaim cannot make any progress and there are too many dirty/writeback pages. Another important aspect is that we do not issue any IO from the direct reclaim context anymore. In a heavy parallel load this could queue a lot of IO which would be very scattered and thus unefficient which would just make the problem worse. This three mechanisms should throttle and keep the amount of IO in a steady state even under heavy IO and memory pressure so yet another throttling point doesn't really seem helpful. Quite contrary, Mikulas Patocka has reported that swap backed by dm-crypt doesn't work properly because the swapout IO cannot make sufficient progress as the writeout path depends on dm_crypt worker which has to allocate memory to perform the encryption. In order to guarantee a forward progress it relies on the mempool allocator. mempool_alloc(), however, prefers to use the underlying (usually page) allocator before it grabs objects from the pool. Such an allocation can dive into the memory reclaim and consequently to throttle_vm_writeout. If there are too many dirty or pages under writeback it will get throttled even though it is in fact a flusher to clear pending pages. kworker/u4:0 D ffff88003df7f438 10488 6 2 0x00000000 Workqueue: kcryptd kcryptd_crypt [dm_crypt] Call Trace: schedule+0x3c/0x90 schedule_timeout+0x1d8/0x360 io_schedule_timeout+0xa4/0x110 congestion_wait+0x86/0x1f0 throttle_vm_writeout+0x44/0xd0 shrink_zone_memcg+0x613/0x720 shrink_zone+0xe0/0x300 do_try_to_free_pages+0x1ad/0x450 try_to_free_pages+0xef/0x300 __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x879/0x1210 alloc_pages_current+0xa1/0x1f0 new_slab+0x2d7/0x6a0 ___slab_alloc+0x3fb/0x5c0 __slab_alloc+0x51/0x90 kmem_cache_alloc+0x27b/0x310 mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30 mempool_alloc+0x91/0x230 bio_alloc_bioset+0xbd/0x260 kcryptd_crypt+0x114/0x3b0 [dm_crypt] Let's just drop throttle_vm_writeout altogether. It is not very much helpful anymore. I have tried to test a potential writeback IO runaway similar to the one described in the original patch which has introduced that [1]. Small virtual machine (512MB RAM, 4 CPUs, 2G of swap space and disk image on a rather slow NFS in a sync mode on the host) with 8 parallel writers each writing 1G worth of data. As soon as the pagecache fills up and the direct reclaim hits then I start anon memory consumer in a loop (allocating 300M and exiting after populating it) in the background to make the memory pressure even stronger as well as to disrupt the steady state for the IO. The direct reclaim is throttled because of the congestion as well as kswapd hitting congestion_wait due to nr_immediate but throttle_vm_writeout doesn't ever trigger the sleep throughout the test. Dirty+writeback are close to nr_dirty_threshold with some fluctuations caused by the anon consumer. [1] https://www2.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.9-rc1/2.6.9-rc1-mm3/broken-out/vm-pageout-throttling.patch Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1471171473-21418-1-git-send-email-mhocko@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com> Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com> Cc: Ondrej Kozina <okozina@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux/writeback.h')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/writeback.h1
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/writeback.h b/include/linux/writeback.h
index fc1e16c25a29..797100e10010 100644
--- a/include/linux/writeback.h
+++ b/include/linux/writeback.h
@@ -319,7 +319,6 @@ void laptop_mode_timer_fn(unsigned long data);
#else
static inline void laptop_sync_completion(void) { }
#endif
-void throttle_vm_writeout(gfp_t gfp_mask);
bool node_dirty_ok(struct pglist_data *pgdat);
int wb_domain_init(struct wb_domain *dom, gfp_t gfp);
#ifdef CONFIG_CGROUP_WRITEBACK