[PATCH v5 4/4] blk-cgroup: Document the design of new lockless iostat_cpu list

Waiman Long
2022-06-02T18:54:29Z

A set of percpu lockless lists per block cgroup (blkcg) is added to
track the set of recently updated iostat_cpu structures. Add comment
in the code to document the design of this new set of lockless lists.

Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
---
block/blk-cgroup.c | 15 +++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 15 insertions(+)

diff --git a/block/blk-cgroup.c b/block/blk-cgroup.c
index 8af97f3b2fc9..f8f27551c16a 100644
--- a/block/blk-cgroup.c
+++ b/block/blk-cgroup.c
@@ -60,6 +60,21 @@ static struct workqueue_struct *blkcg_punt_bio_wq;
#define BLKG_DESTROY_BATCH_SIZE 64

/*
+ * Lockless lists for tracking IO stats update
+ *
+ * New IO stats are stored in the percpu iostat_cpu within blkcg_gq (blkg).
+ * There are multiple blkg's (one for each block device) attached to each
+ * blkcg. The rstat code keeps track of which cpu has IO stats updated,
+ * but it doesn't know which blkg has the updated stats. If there are many
+ * block devices in a system, the cost of iterating all the blkg's to flush
+ * out the IO stats can be high. To reduce such overhead, a set of percpu
+ * lockless lists (lhead) per blkcg are used to track the set of recently
+ * updated iostat_cpu's since the last flush. An iostat_cpu will be put
+ * onto the lockless list on the update side [blk_cgroup_bio_start()] if
+ * not there yet and then removed when being flushed [blkcg_rstat_flush()].
+ * References to blkg are gotten and then put back in the process to
+ * protect against blkg removal.
+ *
* lnode.next of the last entry in a lockless list is NULL. To enable us to
* use lnode.next as a boolean flag to indicate its presence in a lockless
* list, we have to make it non-NULL for all. This is done by using a
--
2.31.1