Re: [PATCH 04/10] xfs: implement freezing by emptying the AIL

Dave Chinner
2012-04-17T04:20:27Z

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 09:54:32AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 08:47:00AM -0500, Mark Tinguely wrote:
> > On 03/27/12 11:44, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > >Now that we write back all metadata either synchronously or through the AIL
> > >we can simply implement metadata freezing in terms of emptying the AIL.
> > >
> > >The implementation for this is fairly simply and straight-forward: A new
> > >routine is added that increments a counter that tells xfsaild to not stop
> > >until the AIL is empty and then waits on a wakeup from
> > >xfs_trans_ail_delete_bulk to signal that the AIL is empty.
> > >
> > >As usual the devil is in the details, in this case the filesystem shutdown
> > >code. Currently we are a bit sloppy there and do not continue ail pushing
> > >in that case, and thus never reach the code in the log item implementations
> > >that can unwind in case of a shutdown filesystem. Also the code to
> > >abort inode and dquot flushes was rather sloppy before and did not remove
> > >the log items from the AIL, which had to be fixed as well.
> > >
> > >Also treat unmount the same way as freeze now, except that we still keep a
> > >synchronous inode reclaim pass to make sure we reclaim all clean inodes, too.
> > >
> > >As an upside we can now remove the radix tree based inode writeback and
> > >xfs_unmountfs_writesb.
> > >
> > >Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig<hch@lst.de>
> >
> > Sorry for the empty email.
> >
> > This series hangs my test boxes. This patch is the first indication
> > of the hang. Reboot, and remove patch 4 and the test are successful.
> >
> > The machine is still responsive. Only the SCRATCH filesystem from
> > the test suite is hung.
> >
> > Per Dave's observation, I added a couple inode reclaims to this
> > patch and the test gets further (hangs on run 9 of test 068 rather
> > than run 3).
>
> That implies that there are dirty inodes at the VFS level leaking
> through the freeze.
>
> .....
.....
> So, what are the flusher threads doing - where are they stuck?

I have an answer of sorts:

90580.054767] task PC stack pid father
[90580.056035] flush-253:16 D 0000000000000001 4136 32084 2 0x00000000
[90580.056035] ffff880004c558a0 0000000000000046 ffff880068b6cd48 ffff880004c55cb0
[90580.056035] ffff88007b616280 ffff880004c55fd8 ffff880004c55fd8 ffff880004c55fd8
[90580.056035] ffff88000681e340 ffff88007b616280 ffff880004c558b0 ffff88007981e000
[90580.056035] Call Trace:
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81afcd19>] schedule+0x29/0x70
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff814801fd>] xfs_trans_alloc+0x5d/0xb0
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81099eb0>] ? add_wait_queue+0x60/0x60
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81416b14>] xfs_setfilesize_trans_alloc+0x34/0xb0
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff814186f5>] xfs_vm_writepage+0x4a5/0x560
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81127507>] __writepage+0x17/0x40
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81127b3d>] write_cache_pages+0x20d/0x460
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff811274f0>] ? set_page_dirty_lock+0x60/0x60
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81127dda>] generic_writepages+0x4a/0x70
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff814167ec>] xfs_vm_writepages+0x4c/0x60
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81129711>] do_writepages+0x21/0x40
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff8118ee42>] writeback_single_inode+0x112/0x380
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff8118f25e>] writeback_sb_inodes+0x1ae/0x270
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff8118f4c0>] wb_writeback+0xe0/0x320
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff8108724a>] ? try_to_del_timer_sync+0x8a/0x110
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81190bc8>] wb_do_writeback+0xb8/0x1d0
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81085f40>] ? usleep_range+0x50/0x50
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81190d6b>] bdi_writeback_thread+0x8b/0x280
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81190ce0>] ? wb_do_writeback+0x1d0/0x1d0
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81099403>] kthread+0x93/0xa0
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81b06f64>] kernel_thread_helper+0x4/0x10
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81099370>] ? kthread_freezable_should_stop+0x70/0x70
[90580.056035] [<ffffffff81b06f60>] ? gs_change+0x13/0x13

A dirty inode has slipped through the freeze process, and the
flusher thread is stuck trying to allocate a transaction for setting
the file size. I can reproduce this fairly easily, so a a bit of
tracing should tell me exactly what is going wrong....

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com