Re: [PATCH] [RFC] vmscan.c: add a sysctl entry for controlling memory reclaim IO congestion_wait length

Matthew Wilcox
2019-09-19T03:50:04Z

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 10:33:10AM +0800, Lin Feng wrote:
> On 9/18/19 20:33, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > I absolutely agree here. From you changelog it is also not clear what is
> > the underlying problem. Both congestion_wait and wait_iff_congested
> > should wake up early if the congestion is handled. Is this not the case?
>
> For now I don't know why, codes seem should work as you said, maybe I need to
> trace more of the internals.
> But weird thing is that once I set the people-disliked-tunable iowait
> drop down instantly, this is contradictory to the code design.

Yes, this is quite strange. If setting a smaller timeout makes a
difference, that indicates we're not waking up soon enough. I see
two possibilities; one is that a wakeup is missing somewhere -- ie the
conditions under which we call clear_wb_congested() are wrong. Or we
need to wake up sooner.

Umm. We have clear_wb_congested() called from exactly one spot --
clear_bdi_congested(). That is only called from:

drivers/block/pktcdvd.c
fs/ceph/addr.c
fs/fuse/control.c
fs/fuse/dev.c
fs/nfs/write.c

Jens, is something supposed to be calling clear_bdi_congested() in the
block layer? blk_clear_congested() used to exist until October 29th
last year. Or is something else supposed to be waking up tasks that
are sleeping on congestion?