Re: [Lsf] IO less throttling and cgroup aware writeback

KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
2011-04-12T03:17:58Z

On Fri, 8 Apr 2011 11:25:56 +1000
Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 05:59:35PM -0700, Greg Thelen wrote:
> > cc: linux-mm
> >
> > Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> writes:

> > If we later find that this supposed uncommon shared inode case is
> > important then we can either implement the previously described lru
> > scanning in mem_cgroup_balance_dirty_pages() or consider extending the
> > bdi/memcg/inode data structures (perhaps with a memcg_mapping) to
> > describe such sharing.
>
> Hmm, another idea I just had. What we're trying to avoid is needing
> to a) track inodes in multiple lists, and b) scanning to find
> something appropriate to write back.
>
> Rather than tracking at page or inode granularity, how about
> tracking "associated" memcgs at the memcg level? i.e. when we detect
> an inode is already dirty in another memcg, link the current memcg
> to the one that contains the inode. Hence if we get a situation
> where a memcg is throttling with no dirty inodes, it can quickly
> find and start writeback in an "associated" memcg that it _knows_
> contain shared dirty inodes. Once we've triggered writeback on an
> associated memcg, it is removed from the list....
>

Thank you for an idea. I think we can start from following.

0. add some feature to set 'preferred inode' for memcg.
I think
fadvise(fd, MAKE_THIF_FILE_UNDER_MY_MEMCG)
or
echo fd > /memory.move_file_here
can be added.

1. account dirty pages for a memcg. as Greg does.
2. at the same time, account dirty pages made dirty by threads in a memcg.
(to check which internal/external thread made page dirty.)
3. calculate internal/external dirty pages gap.

With gap, we can have several choices.

4-a. If it exceeds some thresh, do some notify.
userland daemon can decide to move pages to some memcg or not.
(Of coruse, if the _shared_ dirty can be caught before making page dirty,
user daemon can move inode before making it dirty by inotify().)

I like helps of userland because it can be more flexible than kernel,
it can eat config files.

4-b. set some flag to memcg as 'this memcg is dirty busy because of some extarnal
threads'. When a page is newly dirtied, check the thread's memcg.
If the memcg of a thread and a page is different from each other,
write a memo as 'please check this memcgid , too' in task_struct and
do double-memcg-check in balance_dirty_pages().
(How to clear per-task flag is difficult ;)

I don't want to handle 3-100 threads does shared write case..;)
we'll need 4-a.

Thanks,
-Kame

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