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Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/5] writeback: per task dirty rate limit
From: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
To: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
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        Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>, Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>,
        Andrea Righi <arighi@develer.com>, linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2011 20:35:06 +0200
In-Reply-To: <20110806094527.002914580@intel.com>
References: <20110806084447.388624428@intel.com>
	 <20110806094527.002914580@intel.com>
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On Sat, 2011-08-06 at 16:44 +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> 
> Add two fields to task_struct.
> 
> 1) account dirtied pages in the individual tasks, for accuracy
> 2) per-task balance_dirty_pages() call intervals, for flexibility
> 
> The balance_dirty_pages() call interval (ie. nr_dirtied_pause) will
> scale near-sqrt to the safety gap between dirty pages and threshold.
> 
> XXX: The main problem of per-task nr_dirtied is, if 10k tasks start
> dirtying pages at exactly the same time, each task will be assigned a
> large initial nr_dirtied_pause, so that the dirty threshold will be
> exceeded long before each task reached its nr_dirtied_pause and hence
> call balance_dirty_pages(). 

Right, so why remove the per-cpu threshold? you can keep that as a bound
on the number of out-standing dirty pages.

Loosing that bound is actually a bad thing (TM), since you could have
configured a tight dirty limit and lock up your machine this way.