Re: [PATCH] xfs: improve sync behaviour in face of aggressive dirtying

Christoph Hellwig
2011-06-21T09:29:24Z

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 10:33:43AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > The minor one is that we always flush all work items and not just those
> > on the filesystem to be flushed. This might become an issue for lager
> > systems, or when we apply a similar scheme to fsync, which has the same
> > underlying issue.
>
> For sync, I don't think it matters if we flush a few extra IO
> completions on a busy system. For fsync, it could increase fsync
> completion latency significantly, though I'd suggest we should
> address that problem when we apply the scheme to fsync.

> > The major one is that flush_workqueue only flushed work items that were
> > queued before it was called, but we can requeue completions when we fail
> > to get the ilock in xfs_setfilesize, which can lead to losing i_size
> > updates when it happens.
>
> Yes, I can see that will cause problems....
>
> > I see two ways to fix this: either we implement our own workqueue
> > look-alike based on the old workqueue code. This would allow flushing
> > queues per-sb or even per-inode, and allow us to special case flushing
> > requeues as well before returning.
>
> No need for a look-alike. With the CMWQ infrastructure, there is no
> reason why we need global workqueues anymore. The log, data and
> convert wqs were global to minimise the number of per-cpu threads
> XFS required to operate. CMWQ prevents the explosion of mostly idle
> kernel threads, so we could move all these workqueues to per- struct
> xfs_mount without undue impact.

That helps to work around the impact of syncs on other filesystems, but
it does not help with the EAGAIN requeueing.

> I don't think we want to go to per-inode work contexts. One
> possibility is that for fsync related writeback (e.g. WB_SYNC_ALL)

WB_SYNC_ALL is also used for the second pass of sync.

> we could have a separate "fsync-completion" wqs that we queue
> completions to rather than the more widely used data workqueue. Then
> for fsync we'd only need to flush the fsync-completion workqueue
> rather than the mount wide data and convert wqs, and hence we
> wouldn't stall on IO completion for IO outside of fsync scope...

One thing I've thought about is abusing current->journal_info to
complete ioends in-processes for fsync. That will need Josefs patch
to move the filemap_write_and_wait call into ->fsync. At that point
we can do:

xfs_fsync() {

current->journal_info = &ioend_end_list;

filemap_write_and_wait();

list_for_each_entry_reverse(ioend_end_list) {
process_ioend();
}

current->journal_info = NULL;

which means there's no context switch involved, and as an added benefit
we processing the list reverse means we minimize the number of i_size
updates, which will be especially interesting with my changes to always
log these directly and get rid of the unlogged metadata changes.

It does not cover ioends always pending before we called fsync, but
I hope we can live with that.

What we still need to sort out with the workqueue scheme is a way to
deal with the EAGAIN returns from xfs_setfilesize. From reading your
changelog for that change it seems we can simply kill it once we move
to per-mount completion queues, as the loop device would have it's own
workqueue. If that sounds reasonable I'll respin a series to move to
per-mount workqueues, remove the EAGAIN case, and use the workqueue
flush in sync. Fsync will be left for later, and I'll ping Josef to
resend his fsync prototype change.