Re: [PATCH 4/6] nfsd: filecache: introduce NFSD_FILE_RECENT

Dave Chinner
2025-02-10T23:57:50Z

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 09:01:41AM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote:
> On Fri, 2025-02-07 at 16:15 +1100, NeilBrown wrote:
> > The filecache lru is walked in 2 circumstances for 2 different reasons.
> >
> > 1/ When called from the shrinker we want to discard the first few
> > entries on the list, ignoring any with NFSD_FILE_REFERENCED set
> > because they should really be at the end of the LRU as they have been
> > referenced recently. So those ones are ROTATED.
> >
> > 2/ When called from the nfsd_file_gc() timer function we want to discard
> > anything that hasn't been used since before the previous call, and
> > mark everything else as unused at this point in time.
> >
> > Using the same flag for both of these can result in some unexpected
> > outcomes. If the shrinker callback clears NFSD_FILE_REFERENCED then the
> > nfsd_file_gc() will think the file hasn't been used in a while, while
> > really it has.
> >
> > I think it is easier to reason about the behaviour if we instead have
> > two flags.
> >
> > NFSD_FILE_REFERENCED means "this should be at the end of the LRU, please
> > put it there when convenient"
> > NFSD_FILE_RECENT means "this has been used recently - since the last
> > run of nfsd_file_gc()
> >
> > When either caller finds an NFSD_FILE_REFERENCED entry, that entry
> > should be moved to the end of the LRU and the flag cleared. This can
> > safely happen at any time. The actual order on the lru might not be
> > strictly least-recently-used, but that is normal for linux lrus.
> >
> > The shrinker callback can ignore the "recent" flag. If it ends up
> > freeing something that is "recent" that simply means that memory
> > pressure is sufficient to limit the acceptable cache age to less than
> > the nfsd_file_gc frequency.
> >
> > The gc caller should primarily focus on NFSD_FILE_RECENT. It should
> > free everything that doesn't have this flag set, and should clear the
> > flag on everything else. When it clears the flag it is convenient to
> > clear the "REFERENCED" flag and move to the end of the LRU too.
> >
> > With this, calls from the shrinker do not prematurely age files. It
> > will focus only on freeing those that are least recently used.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
> > ---
> > fs/nfsd/filecache.c | 21 +++++++++++++++++++--
> > fs/nfsd/filecache.h | 1 +
> > fs/nfsd/trace.h | 3 +++
> > 3 files changed, 23 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/fs/nfsd/filecache.c b/fs/nfsd/filecache.c
> > index 04588c03bdfe..9faf469354a5 100644
> > --- a/fs/nfsd/filecache.c
> > +++ b/fs/nfsd/filecache.c
> > @@ -318,10 +318,10 @@ nfsd_file_check_writeback(struct nfsd_file *nf)
> > mapping_tagged(mapping, PAGECACHE_TAG_WRITEBACK);
> > }
> >
> > -
> > static bool nfsd_file_lru_add(struct nfsd_file *nf)
> > {
> > set_bit(NFSD_FILE_REFERENCED, &nf->nf_flags);
> > + set_bit(NFSD_FILE_RECENT, &nf->nf_flags);
>
> Technically, I don't think you need the REFERENCED bit at all. This is
> the only place it's set, and below this is calling list_lru_add_obj().
> That returns false if the object was already on a per-node LRU.
>
> Instead of that, you could add a list_lru helper that will rotate the
> object to the end of its nodelist if it's already on one. OTOH, that
> might mean more cross NUMA-node accesses to the spinlocks than we get
> by using a flag and doing this at GC time.

No, please don't.

Per-object reference bits are required to enable lazy LRU rotation.
The LRU lists are -hot- objects; touching them every time we touch
an object on the LRU is prohibitively expensive because of exclusive
lock/cacheline contention. Hence we defer operations like rotation
to a context where we already have the list locked and cached
exclusively for some other reason (i.e. memory reclaim).

This is the same reason we use lazy removal from LRUs - it avoids
LRU list manipulations every time a hot cached object is accessed
and/or dropped.

IOWs, removing the per-object NFSD_FILE_REFERENCED bit will undo one
of the necessary the optimisations that allow hot caches LRU
management to work efficiently with minimal overhead.

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