Re: [RFC] [PATCH] A clean approach to writeout throttling

Daniel Phillips
2007-12-10T09:20:36Z

Hi Andrew,

Unfortunately, I agreed with your suggestion too hastily. Not only
would it be complex to implement, It does not work. It took me several
days to put my finger on exactly why. Here it is in a nutshell:
resources may be consumed _after_ the gatekeeper runs the "go, no go"
throttling decision. To illustrate, throw 10,000 bios simultaneously
at a block stack that is supposed to allow only about 1,000 in flight
at a time. If the block stack allocates memory somewhat late in its
servicing scheme (for example, when it sends a network message) then it
is possible that no actual resource consumption will have taken place
before all 10,000 bios are allowed past the gate keeper, and deadlock
is sure to occur sooner or later.

In general, we must throttle against the maximum requirement of inflight
bios rather than against the measured consumption. This achieves the
invariant I have touted, namely that memory consumption on the block
writeout path must be bounded. We could therefore possibly use your
suggestion or something resembling it to implement a debug check that
the programmer did in fact do their bounds arithmetic correctly, but
it is not useful for enforcing the bound itself.

In case that coffin needs more nails in it, consider that we would not
only need to account page allocations, but frees as well. So what
tells us that a page has returned to the reserve pool? Oops, tough
one. The page may have been returned to a slab and thus not actually
freed, though it remains available for satisfying new bio transactions.
Because of such caching, your algorithm would quickly lose track of
available resources and grind to a halt.

Never mind that keeping track of page frees is a nasty problem in
itself. They can occur in interrupt context, so forget the current->
idea. Even keeping track of page allocations for bio transactions in
normal context will be a mess, and that is the easy part. I can just
imagine the code attempting to implement this approach acreting into a
monster that gets confusingly close to working without ever actually
getting there.

We do have a simple, elegant solution posted at the head of this thread,
which is known to work.

Regards,

Daniel