Re: [PATCH 05/19] shrinker: convert superblock shrinkers to new API

[Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 03:06:42PM +0400, Glauber Costa wrote:
> On 11/28/2012 03:14 AM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > +static long super_cache_count(struct shrinker *shrink, struct shrink_control *sc)
> > +{
> > +	struct super_block *sb;
> > +	long	total_objects = 0;
> > +
> > +	sb = container_of(shrink, struct super_block, s_shrink);
> > +
> > +	if (!grab_super_passive(sb))
> > +		return -1;
> > +
> 
> 
> You're missing the GFP_FS check here. This leads to us doing all the
> counting only to find out later, in the scanner, that we won't be able
> to free it. Better exit early.

No, I did that intentionally.

The shrinker has a method of deferring work from one invocation to
another - the shrinker->nr_in_batch variable. This is intended to be
used to ensure that a shrinker does the work it is supposed to, even
if it can't do the work immediately due to something like a GFP
context mismatch.

The problem with that mechanism right now is that it is not applied
consistently across the shrinkers. Some shrinkers will return a
count whenever nr_to_scan == 0, regardless of the gfp_mask, while
others will immediately return -1.

What this patch set does is make the shrinkers *always* return the
count of objects so the scan count can be calculated, and then let
the actually scanner determine whether progress can be made. The
result of doing this is that if the scanner cannot make progress,
the work is correctly deferred to the next shrinker invocation that
may be made under a different GFP context.

This is important because when you have a workload that involves a
lot of filesytsem modifications, the number of GFP_NOFS allocations
greatly outweights GFP_KERNEL allocations. Hence the majority of the
time we try to shrink the filesystem caches, they cannot do any
work. Hence we need the work to be deferred to the next GFP_KERNEL
shrinker invocation so the reclaim of the caches remains in balance.

This is also the reason for "We need to avoid excessive windup on
filesystem shrinkers" limiting of total_scan, so that we don't allow
this deferal to completely trash the caches when so much deferal
happens that the scan count grows to exceed the size of the cache
and we get a GFP_KERNEL reclaim context...

IOWs, for this deferal mechanism to work consistently, we always
need to calculate the amount of work we are supposed to do when the
shrinker is invoked. That means we always need to return the current
count of objects iand calculate the amount of scanning we need to
do. The check in the scan context determines if the work then gets
deferred or not....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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