Re: [PATCH 2/4] vfs: add support for a lazytime mount option

Jan Kara
2014-11-25T20:18:20Z

On Tue 25-11-14 12:57:16, Ted Tso wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 06:19:27PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > Actually, I'd also prefer to do the writing from iput_final(). My main
> > reason is that shrinker starts behaving very differently when you put
> > inodes with I_DIRTY_TIME to the LRU. See inode_lru_isolate() and in
> > particular:
> > /*
> > * Referenced or dirty inodes are still in use. Give them another
> > * pass
> > * through the LRU as we canot reclaim them now.
> > */
> > if (atomic_read(&inode->i_count) ||
> > (inode->i_state & ~I_REFERENCED)) {
> > list_del_init(&inode->i_lru);
> > spin_unlock(&inode->i_lock);
> > this_cpu_dec(nr_unused);
> > return LRU_REMOVED;
> > }
>
> I must be missing something; how would the shirnker behave
> differently? I_DIRTY_TIME shouldn't have any effect on the shrinker;
> note that I_DIRTY_TIME is *not* part of I_DIRTY, and this was quite
> deliberate, because I didn't want I_DIRTY_TIME to have any affect on
> any of the other parts of the writeback or inode management parts.
Sure, but the test tests whether the inode has *any other* bit than
I_REFERENCED set. So I_DIRTY_TIME will trigger the test and we just remove
the inode from lru list. You could exclude I_DIRTY_TIME from this test to
avoid this problem but then the shrinker latency would get much larger
because it will suddently do IO in evict(). So I still think doing the
write in iput_final() is the best solution.

> > Regarding your concern that we'd write the inode when file is closed -
> > that's not true. We'll write the inode only after corresponding dentry is
> > evicted and thus drops inode reference. That doesn't seem too bad to me.
>
> True, fair enough. It's not quite so lazy, but it should be close
> enough.
>
> I'm still not seeing the benefit in waiting until the last possible
> minute to write out the timestamps; evict() can block as it is if
> there are any writeback that needs to be completed, and if the
> writeback happens to pages subject to delalloc, the timestamp update
> could happen for free at that point.
Yeah, doing IO from evict is OK in princible but the change in shrinker
success rate / latency worries me... It would certainly need careful
testing under memory pressure & IO load with lots of outstanding timestamp
updates and see how shrinker behaves (change in CPU consumption, numbers of
evicted inodes, etc.).

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR