Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] vfs: improving inode cache iteration scalability

Dave Chinner
2024-10-03T09:59:33Z

On Thu, Oct 03, 2024 at 11:17:41AM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Thu 03-10-24 11:41:42, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 02, 2024 at 07:20:16PM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> > > A couple things that help - we've already determined that the inode LRU
> > > can go away for most filesystems,
> >
> > We haven't determined that yet. I *think* it is possible, but there
> > is a really nasty inode LRU dependencies that has been driven deep
> > down into the mm page cache writeback code. We have to fix that
> > awful layering violation before we can get rid of the inode LRU.
> >
> > I *think* we can do it by requiring dirty inodes to hold an explicit
> > inode reference, thereby keeping the inode pinned in memory whilst
> > it is being tracked for writeback. That would also get rid of the
> > nasty hacks needed in evict() to wait on writeback to complete on
> > unreferenced inodes.
> >
> > However, this isn't simple to do, and so getting rid of the inode
> > LRU is not going to happen in the near term.
>
> Yeah. I agree the way how writeback protects from inode eviction is not the
> prettiest one but the problem with writeback holding normal inode reference
> is that then flush worker for the device can end up deleting unlinked
> inodes which was causing writeback stalls and generally unexpected lock
> ordering issues for some filesystems (already forgot the details).

Yeah, if we end up in evict() on ext4 it will can then do all sorts
of whacky stuff that involves blocking, running transactions and
doing other IO. XFS, OTOH, has been changed to defer all that crap
to background threads (the xfs_inodegc infrastructure) that runs
after the VFS thinks the inode is dead and destroyed. There are some
benefits to having the filesystem inode exist outside the VFS inode
life cycle....

> Now this
> was more that 12 years ago so maybe we could find a better solution to
> those problems these days (e.g. interactions between page writeback and
> page reclaim are very different these days) but I just wanted to warn there
> may be nasty surprises there.

I don't think the situation has improved with filesytsems like ext4.
I think they've actually gotten worse - I recently learnt that ext4
inode eviction can recurse back into the inode cache to instantiate
extended attribute inodes so they can be truncated to allow inode
eviction to make progress.

I suspect the ext4 eviction behaviour is unfixable in any reasonable
time frame, so the only solution I can come up with is to run the
iput() call from a background thread context. (e.g. defer it to a
workqueue). That way iput_final() and eviction processing will not
interfere with other writeback operations....

-Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com