A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chakri n]

Hi,

In my testing, a unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system.
This is not seen in 2.4.

I started 20 threads doing I/O on a NFS share. They are just doing 4K
writes in a loop.

Now I stop NFS server hosting the NFS share and start a
"dd" process to write a file on local EXT3 file system.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000

This process never progresses.
There is plenty of HIGH MEMORY available in the system, but this
process never progresses.

# free
                        total       used          free
shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3238004     609340    2628664          0              15136
    551024
-/+ buffers/cache:      43180    3194824
Swap:      4096532          0    4096532

vmstat on the machine:
# vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
-----cpu------
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   28  344  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  340  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   26  343  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  341  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   26  357  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  325  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0   26  343  0
0  0 100  0
 0 21      0 2628416  15152 551024    0    0     0     0    8  325  0
0  0 100  0

The problem seems to be in balance_dirty_pages, which calculates
dirty_thresh based on only ZONE_NORMAL. The same scenario works fine
in 2.4. The dd processes finishes in no time.
NFS file systems can go offline, due to multiple reasons, a failed
switch, filer etc, but that should not effect other file systems in
the machine.
Can this behavior be fenced?, can the buffer cache be tuned so that
other processes do not see the effect?

The following is the back trace of the processes:
--------------------------------------
PID: 3552   TASK: cb1fc610  CPU: 0   COMMAND: "dd"
 #0 [f5c04c38] schedule at c0624a34
 #1 [f5c04cac] schedule_timeout at c06250ee
 #2 [f5c04cf0] io_schedule_timeout at c0624c15
 #3 [f5c04d04] congestion_wait at c045eb7d
 #4 [f5c04d28] balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr at c045ab91
 #5 [f5c04d7c] generic_file_buffered_write at c0457148
 #6 [f5c04e10] __generic_file_aio_write_nolock at c04576e5
 #7 [f5c04e84] generic_file_aio_write at c0457799
 #8 [f5c04eb4] ext3_file_write at f8888fd7
 #9 [f5c04ed0] do_sync_write at c0472e27
#10 [f5c04f7c] vfs_write at c0473689
#11 [f5c04f98] sys_write at c0473c95
#12 [f5c04fb4] sysenter_entry at c0404ddf
------------------------------------------
PID: 3091  TASK: cb1f0100 CPU: 1   COMMAND: "test"
 #0 [f6050c10] schedule at c0624a34
 #1 [f6050c84] schedule_timeout at c06250ee
 #2 [f6050cc8] io_schedule_timeout at c0624c15
 #3 [f6050cdc] congestion_wait at c045eb7d
 #4 [f6050d00] balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr at c045ab91
 #5 [f6050d54] generic_file_buffered_write at c0457148
 #6 [f6050de8] __generic_file_aio_write_nolock at c04576e5
 #7 [f6050e40] enqueue_entity at c042131f
 #8 [f6050e5c] generic_file_aio_write at c0457799
 #9 [f6050e8c] nfs_file_write at f8f90cee
#10 [f6050e9c] getnstimeofday at c043d3f7
#11 [f6050ed0] do_sync_write at c0472e27
#12 [f6050f7c] vfs_write at c0473689
#13 [f6050f98] sys_write at c0473c95
#14 [f6050fb4] sysenter_entry at c0404ddf

Thanks
--Chakri

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Andrew Morton]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:32:36 -0700 "Chakri n" <chakriin5@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> In my testing, a unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system.
> This is not seen in 2.4.
> 
> I started 20 threads doing I/O on a NFS share. They are just doing 4K
> writes in a loop.
> 
> Now I stop NFS server hosting the NFS share and start a
> "dd" process to write a file on local EXT3 file system.
> 
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000
> 
> This process never progresses.

yup.

> There is plenty of HIGH MEMORY available in the system, but this
> process never progresses.
> 
> ...
> 
> The problem seems to be in balance_dirty_pages, which calculates
> dirty_thresh based on only ZONE_NORMAL. The same scenario works fine
> in 2.4. The dd processes finishes in no time.
> NFS file systems can go offline, due to multiple reasons, a failed
> switch, filer etc, but that should not effect other file systems in
> the machine.
> Can this behavior be fenced?, can the buffer cache be tuned so that
> other processes do not see the effect?

It's unrelated to the actual value of dirty_thresh: if the machine fills up
with dirty (or unstable) NFS pages then eventually new writers will block
until that condition clears.

2.4 doesn't have this problem at low levels of dirty data because 2.4
VFS/MM doesn't account for NFS pages at all.

I'm not sure what we can do about this from a design perspective, really. 
We have data floating about in memory which we're not allowed to discard
and if we allow it to increase without bound it will eventually either
wedge userspace _anyway_ or it will take the machine down, resulting in
data loss.

What it would be nice to do would be to write that data to local disk if
poss, then reclaim it.  Perhaps David Howells' fscache code can do that (or
could be tweaked to do so).

If you really want to fill all memory with pages whic are dirty against a
dead NFS server then you can manually increase
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio - that should give you
the 2.4 behaviour.


<thinks>

Actually we perhaps could address this at the VFS level in another way. 
Processes which are writing to the dead NFS server will eventually block in
balance_dirty_pages() once they've exceeded the memory limits and will
remain blocked until the server wakes up - that's the behaviour we want.

What we _don't_ want to happen is for other processes which are writing to
other, non-dead devices to get collaterally blocked.  We have patches which
might fix that queued for 2.6.24.  Peter?

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

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On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:50 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

> What we _don't_ want to happen is for other processes which are writing to
> other, non-dead devices to get collaterally blocked.  We have patches which
> might fix that queued for 2.6.24.  Peter?

Nasty problem, don't do that :-)

But yeah, with per BDI dirty limits we get stuck at whatever ratio that
NFS server/mount (?) has - which could be 100%. Other processes will
then work almost synchronously against their BDIs but it should work.

[ They will lower the NFS-BDI's ratio, but some fancy clipping code will
  limit the other BDIs their dirty limit to not exceed the total limit.
  And with all these NFS pages stuck, that will still be nothing. ]



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Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chakri n]

Thanks.

The BDI dirty limits sounds like a good idea.

Is there already a patch for this, which I could try?

I believe it works like this,

Each BDI, will have a limit. If the dirty_thresh exceeds the limit,
all the I/O on the block device will be synchronous.

so, if I have sda & a NFS mount, the dirty limit can be different for
each of them.

I can set dirty limit for
 -  sda to be 90% and
 -  NFS mount to be 50%.

So, if the dirty limit is greater than 50%, NFS does synchronously,
but sda can work asynchronously, till dirty limit reaches 90%.

Thanks
--Chakri

On 9/27/07, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:50 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > What we _don't_ want to happen is for other processes which are writing to
> > other, non-dead devices to get collaterally blocked.  We have patches which
> > might fix that queued for 2.6.24.  Peter?
>
> Nasty problem, don't do that :-)
>
> But yeah, with per BDI dirty limits we get stuck at whatever ratio that
> NFS server/mount (?) has - which could be 100%. Other processes will
> then work almost synchronously against their BDIs but it should work.
>
> [ They will lower the NFS-BDI's ratio, but some fancy clipping code will
>   limit the other BDIs their dirty limit to not exceed the total limit.
>   And with all these NFS pages stuck, that will still be nothing. ]
>
>
>
>

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

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[ please don't top-post! ]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 01:27 -0700, Chakri n wrote:

> On 9/27/07, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:50 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > > What we _don't_ want to happen is for other processes which are writing to
> > > other, non-dead devices to get collaterally blocked.  We have patches which
> > > might fix that queued for 2.6.24.  Peter?
> >
> > Nasty problem, don't do that :-)
> >
> > But yeah, with per BDI dirty limits we get stuck at whatever ratio that
> > NFS server/mount (?) has - which could be 100%. Other processes will
> > then work almost synchronously against their BDIs but it should work.
> >
> > [ They will lower the NFS-BDI's ratio, but some fancy clipping code will
> >   limit the other BDIs their dirty limit to not exceed the total limit.
> >   And with all these NFS pages stuck, that will still be nothing. ]
> >
> Thanks.
> 
> The BDI dirty limits sounds like a good idea.
> 
> Is there already a patch for this, which I could try?

v2.6.23-rc8-mm2

> I believe it works like this,
> 
> Each BDI, will have a limit. If the dirty_thresh exceeds the limit,
> all the I/O on the block device will be synchronous.
> 
> so, if I have sda & a NFS mount, the dirty limit can be different for
> each of them.
> 
> I can set dirty limit for
>  -  sda to be 90% and
>  -  NFS mount to be 50%.
> 
> So, if the dirty limit is greater than 50%, NFS does synchronously,
> but sda can work asynchronously, till dirty limit reaches 90%.

Not quite, the system determines the limit itself in an adaptive
fashion.

  bdi_limit = total_limit * p_bdi

Where p is a faction [0,1], and is determined by the relative writeout
speed of the current BDI vs all other BDIs.

So if you were to have 3 BDIs (sda, sdb and 1 nfs mount), and sda is
idle, and the nfs mount gets twice as much traffic as sdb, the ratios
will look like:

 p_sda: 0
 p_sdb: 1/3
 p_nfs: 2/3

Once the traffic exceeds the write speed of the device we build up a
backlog and stuff gets throttled, so these proportions converge to the
relative write speed of the BDIs when saturated with data.

So what can happen in your case is that the NFS mount is the only one
with traffic is will get a fraction of 1. If it then disconnects like in
your case, it will still have all of the dirty limit pinned for NFS.

However other devices will at that moment try to maintain a limit of 0,
which ends up being similar to a sync mount.

So they'll not get stuck, but they will be slow.

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Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chakri n]

Thanks for explaining the adaptive logic.

> However other devices will at that moment try to maintain a limit of 0,
> which ends up being similar to a sync mount.
>
> So they'll not get stuck, but they will be slow.
>
>

Sync should be ok, when the situation is bad like this and some one
hijacked all the buffers.

But, I see my simple dd to write 10blocks on local disk never
completes even after 10 minutes.

[root@h46 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=10

I think the process is completely stuck and is not progressing at all.

Is something going wrong in the calculations where it does not fall
back to sync mode.

Thanks
--Chakri

On 9/28/07, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
> [ please don't top-post! ]
>
> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 01:27 -0700, Chakri n wrote:
>
> > On 9/27/07, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:50 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > >
> > > > What we _don't_ want to happen is for other processes which are writing to
> > > > other, non-dead devices to get collaterally blocked.  We have patches which
> > > > might fix that queued for 2.6.24.  Peter?
> > >
> > > Nasty problem, don't do that :-)
> > >
> > > But yeah, with per BDI dirty limits we get stuck at whatever ratio that
> > > NFS server/mount (?) has - which could be 100%. Other processes will
> > > then work almost synchronously against their BDIs but it should work.
> > >
> > > [ They will lower the NFS-BDI's ratio, but some fancy clipping code will
> > >   limit the other BDIs their dirty limit to not exceed the total limit.
> > >   And with all these NFS pages stuck, that will still be nothing. ]
> > >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > The BDI dirty limits sounds like a good idea.
> >
> > Is there already a patch for this, which I could try?
>
> v2.6.23-rc8-mm2
>
> > I believe it works like this,
> >
> > Each BDI, will have a limit. If the dirty_thresh exceeds the limit,
> > all the I/O on the block device will be synchronous.
> >
> > so, if I have sda & a NFS mount, the dirty limit can be different for
> > each of them.
> >
> > I can set dirty limit for
> >  -  sda to be 90% and
> >  -  NFS mount to be 50%.
> >
> > So, if the dirty limit is greater than 50%, NFS does synchronously,
> > but sda can work asynchronously, till dirty limit reaches 90%.
>
> Not quite, the system determines the limit itself in an adaptive
> fashion.
>
>   bdi_limit = total_limit * p_bdi
>
> Where p is a faction [0,1], and is determined by the relative writeout
> speed of the current BDI vs all other BDIs.
>
> So if you were to have 3 BDIs (sda, sdb and 1 nfs mount), and sda is
> idle, and the nfs mount gets twice as much traffic as sdb, the ratios
> will look like:
>
>  p_sda: 0
>  p_sdb: 1/3
>  p_nfs: 2/3
>
> Once the traffic exceeds the write speed of the device we build up a
> backlog and stuff gets throttled, so these proportions converge to the
> relative write speed of the BDIs when saturated with data.
>
> So what can happen in your case is that the NFS mount is the only one
> with traffic is will get a fraction of 1. If it then disconnects like in
> your case, it will still have all of the dirty limit pinned for NFS.
>
> However other devices will at that moment try to maintain a limit of 0,
> which ends up being similar to a sync mount.
>
> So they'll not get stuck, but they will be slow.
>
>

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

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On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 02:01 -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> Thanks for explaining the adaptive logic.
> 
> > However other devices will at that moment try to maintain a limit of 0,
> > which ends up being similar to a sync mount.
> >
> > So they'll not get stuck, but they will be slow.
> >
> >
> 
> Sync should be ok, when the situation is bad like this and some one
> hijacked all the buffers.
> 
> But, I see my simple dd to write 10blocks on local disk never
> completes even after 10 minutes.
> 
> [root@h46 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=10
> 
> I think the process is completely stuck and is not progressing at all.
> 
> Is something going wrong in the calculations where it does not fall
> back to sync mode.

What kernel is that?


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Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chakri n]

It's 2.6.23-rc6.

Thanks
--Chakri

On 9/28/07, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 02:01 -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> > Thanks for explaining the adaptive logic.
> >
> > > However other devices will at that moment try to maintain a limit of 0,
> > > which ends up being similar to a sync mount.
> > >
> > > So they'll not get stuck, but they will be slow.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Sync should be ok, when the situation is bad like this and some one
> > hijacked all the buffers.
> >
> > But, I see my simple dd to write 10blocks on local disk never
> > completes even after 10 minutes.
> >
> > [root@h46 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=10
> >
> > I think the process is completely stuck and is not progressing at all.
> >
> > Is something going wrong in the calculations where it does not fall
> > back to sync mode.
>
> What kernel is that?
>
>
>

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

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 [ and one copy for the list too ]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 02:20 -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> It's 2.6.23-rc6.

Could you try .23-rc8-mm2. It includes the per bdi stuff.

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Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chakri n]

It's works on .23-rc8-mm2 with out any problems.

"dd" process does not hang any more.

Thanks for all the help.

Cheers
--Chakri


On 9/28/07, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
>  [ and one copy for the list too ]
>
> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 02:20 -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> > It's 2.6.23-rc6.
>
> Could you try .23-rc8-mm2. It includes the per bdi stuff.
>
>

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Jonathan Corbet]

Andrew wrote:
> It's unrelated to the actual value of dirty_thresh: if the machine fills up
> with dirty (or unstable) NFS pages then eventually new writers will block
> until that condition clears.
> 
> 2.4 doesn't have this problem at low levels of dirty data because 2.4
> VFS/MM doesn't account for NFS pages at all.

Is it really NFS-related?  I was trying to back up my 2.6.23-rc8 system
to an external USB drive the other day when something flaked and the
drive fell off the bus.  That, too, was sufficient to wedge the entire
system, even though the only thing which needed the dead drive was one
rsync process.  It's kind of a bummer to have to hit the reset button
after the failure of (what should be) a non-critical piece of hardware.

Not that I have a fix to propose...:)

jon

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

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On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 07:28 -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Andrew wrote:
> > It's unrelated to the actual value of dirty_thresh: if the machine fills up
> > with dirty (or unstable) NFS pages then eventually new writers will block
> > until that condition clears.
> > 
> > 2.4 doesn't have this problem at low levels of dirty data because 2.4
> > VFS/MM doesn't account for NFS pages at all.
> 
> Is it really NFS-related?  I was trying to back up my 2.6.23-rc8 system
> to an external USB drive the other day when something flaked and the
> drive fell off the bus.  That, too, was sufficient to wedge the entire
> system, even though the only thing which needed the dead drive was one
> rsync process.  It's kind of a bummer to have to hit the reset button
> after the failure of (what should be) a non-critical piece of hardware.
> 
> Not that I have a fix to propose...:)

the per bdi work in -mm should make the system not drop dead.

Still, would a remove,re-insert of the usb media end up with the same
bdi? That is, would it recognise as the same and resume the transfer.

Anyway, it would be grand (and dangerous) if we could provide for a
button that would just kill off all outstanding pages against a dead
device.

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Re: [linux-pm] Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Alan Stern]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 07:28 -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:

> > Is it really NFS-related?  I was trying to back up my 2.6.23-rc8 system
> > to an external USB drive the other day when something flaked and the
> > drive fell off the bus.  That, too, was sufficient to wedge the entire
> > system, even though the only thing which needed the dead drive was one
> > rsync process.  It's kind of a bummer to have to hit the reset button
> > after the failure of (what should be) a non-critical piece of hardware.
> > 
> > Not that I have a fix to propose...:)
> 
> the per bdi work in -mm should make the system not drop dead.
> 
> Still, would a remove,re-insert of the usb media end up with the same
> bdi? That is, would it recognise as the same and resume the transfer.

Removal and replacement of the media might work.  I have never tried 
it.

But Jon described removal of the device, not the media.  Replacing the 
device definitely will not work.

Alan Stern

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Trond Myklebust]

On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:50 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Actually we perhaps could address this at the VFS level in another way. 
> Processes which are writing to the dead NFS server will eventually block in
> balance_dirty_pages() once they've exceeded the memory limits and will
> remain blocked until the server wakes up - that's the behaviour we want.
> 
> What we _don't_ want to happen is for other processes which are writing to
> other, non-dead devices to get collaterally blocked.  We have patches which
> might fix that queued for 2.6.24.  Peter?

Do these patches also cause the memory reclaimers to steer clear of
devices that are congested (and stop waiting on a congested device if
they see that it remains congested for a long period of time)? Most of
the collateral blocking I see tends to happen in memory allocation...

Cheers
  Trond

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:28:52 -0600 corbet@lwn.net (Jonathan Corbet) wrote:

> Andrew wrote:
> > It's unrelated to the actual value of dirty_thresh: if the machine fills up
> > with dirty (or unstable) NFS pages then eventually new writers will block
> > until that condition clears.
> > 
> > 2.4 doesn't have this problem at low levels of dirty data because 2.4
> > VFS/MM doesn't account for NFS pages at all.
> 
> Is it really NFS-related?  I was trying to back up my 2.6.23-rc8 system
> to an external USB drive the other day when something flaked and the
> drive fell off the bus.  That, too, was sufficient to wedge the entire
> system, even though the only thing which needed the dead drive was one
> rsync process.  It's kind of a bummer to have to hit the reset button
> after the failure of (what should be) a non-critical piece of hardware.
> 
> Not that I have a fix to propose...:)
> 

That's a USB bug, surely.  What should happen is that the kernel attempts
writeback, gets an IO error and then your data gets lost.

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 11:49 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Do you know where the stalls are occurring?  throttle_vm_writeout(), or via
> direct calls to congestion_wait() from page_alloc.c and vmscan.c?  (running
> sysrq-w five or ten times will probably be enough to determine this)

would it make sense to instrument congestion_wait() callsites with
vmstats?

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:00:53 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 23:50 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > Actually we perhaps could address this at the VFS level in another way. 
> > Processes which are writing to the dead NFS server will eventually block in
> > balance_dirty_pages() once they've exceeded the memory limits and will
> > remain blocked until the server wakes up - that's the behaviour we want.
> > 
> > What we _don't_ want to happen is for other processes which are writing to
> > other, non-dead devices to get collaterally blocked.  We have patches which
> > might fix that queued for 2.6.24.  Peter?
> 
> Do these patches also cause the memory reclaimers to steer clear of
> devices that are congested (and stop waiting on a congested device if
> they see that it remains congested for a long period of time)? Most of
> the collateral blocking I see tends to happen in memory allocation...
> 

No, they don't attempt to do that, but I suspect they put in place
infrastructure which could be used to improve direct-reclaimer latency.  In
the throttle_vm_writeout() path, at least.

Do you know where the stalls are occurring?  throttle_vm_writeout(), or via
direct calls to congestion_wait() from page_alloc.c and vmscan.c?  (running
sysrq-w five or ten times will probably be enough to determine this)

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Trond Myklebust]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1007 bytes --]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 11:49 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:00:53 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > Do these patches also cause the memory reclaimers to steer clear of
> > devices that are congested (and stop waiting on a congested device if
> > they see that it remains congested for a long period of time)? Most of
> > the collateral blocking I see tends to happen in memory allocation...
> > 
> 
> No, they don't attempt to do that, but I suspect they put in place
> infrastructure which could be used to improve direct-reclaimer latency.  In
> the throttle_vm_writeout() path, at least.
> 
> Do you know where the stalls are occurring?  throttle_vm_writeout(), or via
> direct calls to congestion_wait() from page_alloc.c and vmscan.c?  (running
> sysrq-w five or ten times will probably be enough to determine this)

Looking back, they were getting caught up in
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
example...

Cheers
  Trond

[-- Attachment #2: Attached message - [NFS] NFS on loopback locks up entire system(2.6.23-rc6)? --]
[-- Type: message/rfc822, Size: 9371 bytes --]

From: "Chakri n" <chakriin5@gmail.com>
To: nfs@lists.sourceforge.net, Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [NFS] NFS on loopback locks up entire system(2.6.23-rc6)?
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:22:26 -0700
Message-ID: <92cbf19b0709201722k6265e647x31b7d25bc54b63a0@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

I am testing NFS on loopback locks up entire system with 2.6.23-rc6 kernel.

I have mounted a local ext3 partition using loopback NFS (version 3)
and started my test program. The test program forks 20 threads
allocates 10MB for each thread, writes & reads a file on the loopback
NFS mount. After running for about 5 min, I cannot even login to the
machine. Commands like ps etc, hang in a live session.

The machine is a DELL 1950 with 4Gig of RAM, so there is plenty of RAM
& CPU to play around and no other io/heavy processes are running on
the system.

vmstat output shows no buffers are actually getting transferred in or
out and iowait is 100%.

[root@h46 ~]# vmstat 1
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
-----cpu------
 r  b    swpd       free       buff       cache   si   so   bi   bo
in     cs us sy id wa st
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0   28  345  0
1  0 99  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0    5  329  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0   26  336  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0    8  335  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0   26  352  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0    8  351  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0   23  358  0
1  0 99  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0   10  350  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0   26  363  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0    8  346  0
1  0 99  0
 0 24    116 110080  11132 3045664    0    0     0     0   26  360  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11140 3045656    0    0     8     0   11  345  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11140 3045664    0    0     0     0   27  355  0
0  2 97  0
 0 24    116 110080  11140 3045664    0    0     0     0    9  330  0
0  0 100  0
 0 24    116 110080  11140 3045664    0    0     0     0   26  358  0
0  0 100  0


The following is the backtrace of
1. one of the threads of my test program
2. nfsd daemon and
3. a generic command like pstree, after the machine hangs:
-------------------------------------------------------------
crash> bt 3252
PID: 3252   TASK: f6f3c610  CPU: 0   COMMAND: "test"
 #0 [f6bdcc10] schedule at c0624a34
 #1 [f6bdcc84] schedule_timeout at c06250ee
 #2 [f6bdccc8] io_schedule_timeout at c0624c15
 #3 [f6bdccdc] congestion_wait at c045eb7d
 #4 [f6bdcd00] balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr at c045ab91
 #5 [f6bdcd54] generic_file_buffered_write at c0457148
 #6 [f6bdcde8] __generic_file_aio_write_nolock at c04576e5
 #7 [f6bdce40] try_to_wake_up at c042342b
 #8 [f6bdce5c] generic_file_aio_write at c0457799
 #9 [f6bdce8c] nfs_file_write at f8c25cee
#10 [f6bdced0] do_sync_write at c0472e27
#11 [f6bdcf7c] vfs_write at c0473689
#12 [f6bdcf98] sys_write at c0473c95
#13 [f6bdcfb4] sysenter_entry at c0404ddf
    EAX: 00000004  EBX: 00000013  ECX: a4966008  EDX: 00980000
    DS:  007b      ESI: 00980000  ES:  007b      EDI: a4966008
    SS:  007b      ESP: a5ae6ec0  EBP: a5ae6ef0
    CS:  0073      EIP: b7eed410  ERR: 00000004  EFLAGS: 00000246
crash> bt 3188
PID: 3188   TASK: f74c4000  CPU: 1   COMMAND: "nfsd"
 #0 [f6836c7c] schedule at c0624a34
 #1 [f6836cf0] __mutex_lock_slowpath at c062543d
 #2 [f6836d0c] mutex_lock at c0625326
 #3 [f6836d18] generic_file_aio_write at c0457784
 #4 [f6836d48] ext3_file_write at f8888fd7
 #5 [f6836d64] do_sync_readv_writev at c0472d1f
 #6 [f6836e08] do_readv_writev at c0473486
 #7 [f6836e6c] vfs_writev at c047358e
 #8 [f6836e7c] nfsd_vfs_write at f8e7f8d7
 #9 [f6836ee0] nfsd_write at f8e80139
#10 [f6836f10] nfsd3_proc_write at f8e86afd
#11 [f6836f44] nfsd_dispatch at f8e7c20c
#12 [f6836f6c] svc_process at f89c18e0
#13 [f6836fbc] nfsd at f8e7c794
#14 [f6836fe4] kernel_thread_helper at c0405a35
crash> ps|grep ps
    234      2   3  cb194000  IN   0.0       0      0  [khpsbpkt]
    520      2   0  f7e18c20  IN   0.0       0      0  [kpsmoused]
   2859      1   2  f7f3cc20  IN   0.1    9600   2040  cupsd
   3340   3310   0  f4a0f840  UN   0.0    4360    816  pstree
   3343   3284   2  f4a0f230  UN   0.0    4212    944  ps
crash> bt 3340
PID: 3340   TASK: f4a0f840  CPU: 0   COMMAND: "pstree"
 #0 [e856be30] schedule at c0624a34
 #1 [e856bea4] rwsem_down_failed_common at c04df6c0
 #2 [e856bec4] rwsem_down_read_failed at c0625c2a
 #3 [e856bedc] call_rwsem_down_read_failed at c0625c96
 #4 [e856bee8] down_read at c043c21a
 #5 [e856bef0] access_process_vm at c0462039
 #6 [e856bf38] proc_pid_cmdline at c04a1bbb
 #7 [e856bf58] proc_info_read at c04a2f41
 #8 [e856bf7c] vfs_read at c04737db
 #9 [e856bf98] sys_read at c0473c2e
#10 [e856bfb4] sysenter_entry at c0404ddf
    EAX: 00000003  EBX: 00000005  ECX: 0804dc58  EDX: 00000062
    DS:  007b      ESI: 00000cba  ES:  007b      EDI: 0804e0e0
    SS:  007b      ESP: bfa3afe8  EBP: bfa3d4f8
    CS:  0073      EIP: b7f64410  ERR: 00000003  EFLAGS: 00000246
----------------------------------------------------------

Any ideas what could potentially trigger this?

Please let me know if you would like to get any other specific details.

Thanks
--Chakri

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Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 20:48:59 +0200 Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 11:49 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > Do you know where the stalls are occurring?  throttle_vm_writeout(), or via
> > direct calls to congestion_wait() from page_alloc.c and vmscan.c?  (running
> > sysrq-w five or ten times will probably be enough to determine this)
> 
> would it make sense to instrument congestion_wait() callsites with
> vmstats?

Better than nothing, but it isn't a great fit: we'd need one vmstat counter
per congestion_wait() callsite, and it's all rather specific to the
kernel-of-the-day.

taskstats delay accounting isn't useful either - it will aggregate all the
schedule() callsites.

profile=sleep is just about ideal for this, isn't it?  I suspect that most
people don't know it's there, or forgot about it.

It could be that profile=sleep just tells us "you're spending a lot of time
in io_schedule()" or congestion_wait(), so perhaps we need to teach it to
go for walk up the stack somehow.

But lockdep knows how to do that already so perhaps we (ie: you ;)) can
bolt sleep instrumentation onto lockdep as we (ie you ;)) did with the
lockstat stuff?

(Searches for the lockstat documentation)

Did we forget to do that?

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 11:49 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:00:53 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > > Do these patches also cause the memory reclaimers to steer clear of
> > > devices that are congested (and stop waiting on a congested device if
> > > they see that it remains congested for a long period of time)? Most of
> > > the collateral blocking I see tends to happen in memory allocation...
> > > 
> > 
> > No, they don't attempt to do that, but I suspect they put in place
> > infrastructure which could be used to improve direct-reclaimer latency.  In
> > the throttle_vm_writeout() path, at least.
> > 
> > Do you know where the stalls are occurring?  throttle_vm_writeout(), or via
> > direct calls to congestion_wait() from page_alloc.c and vmscan.c?  (running
> > sysrq-w five or ten times will probably be enough to determine this)
> 
> Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> example...

that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?

NFS on loopback used to hang, but then we fixed it.  It looks like we
broke it again sometime in the intervening four years or so.

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Trond Myklebust]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> > example...
> 
> that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?

I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It is
an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the NFS
client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging on the
nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing could
happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS server that
is down.

> NFS on loopback used to hang, but then we fixed it.  It looks like we
> broke it again sometime in the intervening four years or so.

It has been quirky all through the 2.6.x series because of this issue.

Cheers
  Trond

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:52:28 -0400
Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > > Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> > > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> > > example...
> > 
> > that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?
> 
> I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It is
> an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the NFS
> client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging on the
> nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing could
> happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS server that
> is down.

hm, so ext3 got stuck in nfs via __alloc_pages direct reclaim?

We should be able to fix that by marking the backing device as
write-congested.  That'll have small race windows, but it should be a 99.9%
fix?

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Daniel Phillips]

On Friday 28 September 2007 12:52, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It
> is an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the
> NFS client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging
> on the nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing
> could happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS
> server that is down.

Hi Trond,

Could you clarify what you meant by "calling the NFS client"?  I don't 
see any direct call in the posted backtrace.

Regards,

Daniel

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Trond Myklebust]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 13:10 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:52:28 -0400
> Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > > > Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> > > > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> > > > example...
> > > 
> > > that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?
> > 
> > I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It is
> > an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the NFS
> > client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging on the
> > nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing could
> > happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS server that
> > is down.
> 
> hm, so ext3 got stuck in nfs via __alloc_pages direct reclaim?
> 
> We should be able to fix that by marking the backing device as
> write-congested.  That'll have small race windows, but it should be a 99.9%
> fix?

No. The problem would rather appear to be that we're doing
per-backing_dev writeback (if I read sync_sb_inodes() correctly), but
we're measuring variables which are global to the VM. The backing device
that we are selecting may not be writing out any dirty pages, in which
case, we're just spinning in balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited().

Should we therefore perhaps be looking at adding per-backing_dev stats
too?

Trond

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:32:18 -0400
Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 13:10 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:52:28 -0400
> > Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > > > > Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> > > > > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> > > > > example...
> > > > 
> > > > that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?
> > > 
> > > I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It is
> > > an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the NFS
> > > client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging on the
> > > nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing could
> > > happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS server that
> > > is down.
> > 
> > hm, so ext3 got stuck in nfs via __alloc_pages direct reclaim?
> > 
> > We should be able to fix that by marking the backing device as
> > write-congested.  That'll have small race windows, but it should be a 99.9%
> > fix?
> 
> No. The problem would rather appear to be that we're doing
> per-backing_dev writeback (if I read sync_sb_inodes() correctly), but
> we're measuring variables which are global to the VM. The backing device
> that we are selecting may not be writing out any dirty pages, in which
> case, we're just spinning in balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited().

OK, so it's unrelated to page reclaim.

> Should we therefore perhaps be looking at adding per-backing_dev stats
> too?

That's what mm-per-device-dirty-threshold.patch and friends are doing. 
Whether it works adequately is not really known at this time. 
Unfortunately kernel developers don't test -mm much.  

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chakri n]

Here is a the snapshot of vmstats when the problem happened. I believe
this could help a little.

crash> kmem -V
       NR_FREE_PAGES: 680853
         NR_INACTIVE: 95380
           NR_ACTIVE: 26891
       NR_ANON_PAGES: 2507
      NR_FILE_MAPPED: 1832
       NR_FILE_PAGES: 119779
       NR_FILE_DIRTY: 0
        NR_WRITEBACK: 18272
 NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE: 1305
NR_SLAB_UNRECLAIMABLE: 2085
        NR_PAGETABLE: 123
     NR_UNSTABLE_NFS: 0
           NR_BOUNCE: 0
     NR_VMSCAN_WRITE: 0

In my testing, I always saw the processes are waiting in
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited(), never in throttle_vm_writeout()
path.

But this could be because I have about 4Gig of memory in the system
and plenty of mem is still available around.

I will rerun the test limiting memory to 1024MB and lets see if it
takes in any different path.

Thanks
--Chakri


On 9/28/07, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:32:18 -0400
> Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 13:10 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:52:28 -0400
> > > Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > > > > > Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> > > > > > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> > > > > > example...
> > > > >
> > > > > that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?
> > > >
> > > > I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It is
> > > > an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the NFS
> > > > client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging on the
> > > > nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing could
> > > > happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS server that
> > > > is down.
> > >
> > > hm, so ext3 got stuck in nfs via __alloc_pages direct reclaim?
> > >
> > > We should be able to fix that by marking the backing device as
> > > write-congested.  That'll have small race windows, but it should be a 99.9%
> > > fix?
> >
> > No. The problem would rather appear to be that we're doing
> > per-backing_dev writeback (if I read sync_sb_inodes() correctly), but
> > we're measuring variables which are global to the VM. The backing device
> > that we are selecting may not be writing out any dirty pages, in which
> > case, we're just spinning in balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited().
>
> OK, so it's unrelated to page reclaim.
>
> > Should we therefore perhaps be looking at adding per-backing_dev stats
> > too?
>
> That's what mm-per-device-dirty-threshold.patch and friends are doing.
> Whether it works adequately is not really known at this time.
> Unfortunately kernel developers don't test -mm much.
>

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chakri n]

No change in behavior even in case of low memory systems. I confirmed
it running on 1Gig machine.

Thanks
--Chakri

On 9/28/07, Chakri n <chakriin5@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is a the snapshot of vmstats when the problem happened. I believe
> this could help a little.
>
> crash> kmem -V
>        NR_FREE_PAGES: 680853
>          NR_INACTIVE: 95380
>            NR_ACTIVE: 26891
>        NR_ANON_PAGES: 2507
>       NR_FILE_MAPPED: 1832
>        NR_FILE_PAGES: 119779
>        NR_FILE_DIRTY: 0
>         NR_WRITEBACK: 18272
>  NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE: 1305
> NR_SLAB_UNRECLAIMABLE: 2085
>         NR_PAGETABLE: 123
>      NR_UNSTABLE_NFS: 0
>            NR_BOUNCE: 0
>      NR_VMSCAN_WRITE: 0
>
> In my testing, I always saw the processes are waiting in
> balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited(), never in throttle_vm_writeout()
> path.
>
> But this could be because I have about 4Gig of memory in the system
> and plenty of mem is still available around.
>
> I will rerun the test limiting memory to 1024MB and lets see if it
> takes in any different path.
>
> Thanks
> --Chakri
>
>
> On 9/28/07, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:32:18 -0400
> > Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 13:10 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:52:28 -0400
> > > > Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > > > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> > > > > > > Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> > > > > > > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> > > > > > > example...
> > > > > >
> > > > > > that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?
> > > > >
> > > > > I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It is
> > > > > an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the NFS
> > > > > client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging on the
> > > > > nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing could
> > > > > happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS server that
> > > > > is down.
> > > >
> > > > hm, so ext3 got stuck in nfs via __alloc_pages direct reclaim?
> > > >
> > > > We should be able to fix that by marking the backing device as
> > > > write-congested.  That'll have small race windows, but it should be a 99.9%
> > > > fix?
> > >
> > > No. The problem would rather appear to be that we're doing
> > > per-backing_dev writeback (if I read sync_sb_inodes() correctly), but
> > > we're measuring variables which are global to the VM. The backing device
> > > that we are selecting may not be writing out any dirty pages, in which
> > > case, we're just spinning in balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited().
> >
> > OK, so it's unrelated to page reclaim.
> >
> > > Should we therefore perhaps be looking at adding per-backing_dev stats
> > > too?
> >
> > That's what mm-per-device-dirty-threshold.patch and friends are doing.
> > Whether it works adequately is not really known at this time.
> > Unfortunately kernel developers don't test -mm much.
> >
>

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Daniel Phillips]

On Thursday 27 September 2007 23:50, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Actually we perhaps could address this at the VFS level in another
> way. Processes which are writing to the dead NFS server will
> eventually block in balance_dirty_pages() once they've exceeded the
> memory limits and will remain blocked until the server wakes up -
> that's the behaviour we want.

It is not necessary to restrict total dirty pages at all.  Instead it is 
necessary to restrict total writeout in flight.  This is evident from 
the fact that making progress is the one and only reason our kernel 
exists, and writeout is how we make progress clearing memory.  In other 
words, if we guarantee the progress of writeout, we will live happily 
ever after and not have to sell the farm.

The current situation has an eerily similar feeling to the VM 
instability in early 2.4, which was never solved until we convinced 
ourselves that the only way to deal with Moore's law as applied to 
number of memory pages was to implement positive control of swapout in 
the form of reverse mapping[1].  This time round, we need to add 
positive control of writeout in the form of rate limiting.

I _think_ Peter is with me on this, and not only that, but between the 
too of us we already have patches for most of the subsystems that need 
it, and we have both been busy testing (different subsets of) these 
patches to destruction for the better part of a year.

Anyway, to fix the immediate bug before the one true dirty_limit removal 
patch lands (promise) I think you are on the right track by noticing 
that balance_dirty_pages has to become aware of how congested the 
involved block device is, since blocking a writeout process on an 
underused block device is clearly a bad idea.  Note how much this idea 
looks like rate limiting.

[1] We lost the scent for a number of reasons, not least because the 
experimental implementation of reverse mapping at the time was buggy 
for reasons entirely unrelated to the reverse mapping itself.

Regards,

Daniel

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Daniel Phillips]

On Friday 28 September 2007 06:35, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> ,,,it would be grand (and dangerous) if we could provide for a
> button that would just kill off all outstanding pages against a dead
> device.

Substitute "resources" for "pages" and you begin to get an idea of how 
tricky that actually is.  That said, this is exactly what we have done 
with ddsnap, for the simple reason that our users, now emboldened by 
being able to stop or terminate the user space part, felt justified in 
expecting that the system continue as if nothing had happened, and 
furthermore, be able to restart ddsnap without a hiccup.  (Otherwise 
known as a sysop's diety-given right to kill.)

So this is what we do in the specific case of ddsnap:

   * When we detect some nasty state change such as our userspace
      control daemon disappearing on us, we go poking around and
      explicitly release every semaphore that the device driver could
      possibly wait on forever (interestingly they are all in our own
      driver except for BKL, which is just an artifact of device mapper
      not having gone over to unlock_ioctl for no good reason that I
      know of).

   * Then at the points were the driver falls through some lock thus
      released, we check our "ready" flag, and if it indicates "busted",
      proceed with wherever cleanup is needed at that point.

Does not sound like an approach one would expect to work reliably, does 
it?  But there just may be some general principle to be ferretted out 
here.  (Anyone who has ideas on how bits of this procedure could be 
abstracted, please do not hesitate to step boldly forth into the 
limelight.)

Incidentally, only a small subset of locks needed special handling as 
above.  Most can be shown to have no way to block forever, short of an 
outright bug.

I shudder to think how much work it would be to bring every driver in 
the kernel up to such a standard, particularly if user space components 
are involved, as with USB.  On the other hand, every driver fixed is 
one less driver that sucks.  The next one to emerge from the pipeline 
will most likely be NBD, which we have been working on in fits and 
starts for a while.  Look for it to morph into "ddbd", with cross-node 
distributed data awareness, in addition to perforning its current job 
without deadlocking.

Regards,

Daniel

KDB?

[Daniel Phillips]

On Friday 28 September 2007 12:16, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> crash> bt 3188

crash> ps|grep ps

Hey, that looks just like kdb!  But I heard that kgdb is better in every 
way than kdb.

Innocently yours,

Daniel

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Fengguang Wu]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:32:36PM -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In my testing, a unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system.
> This is not seen in 2.4.
> 
> I started 20 threads doing I/O on a NFS share. They are just doing 4K
> writes in a loop.
> 
> Now I stop NFS server hosting the NFS share and start a
> "dd" process to write a file on local EXT3 file system.
> 
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000
> 
> This process never progresses.

Peter, do you think this patch will help?

===
writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on light-load bdi

On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than enough dirty data.

The problem case:

0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
   sdb/nr_dirty == 0
1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time as long as sda is overloaded

Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
(In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)

Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
---
 mm/page-writeback.c |    3 +++
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

--- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -227,6 +227,9 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
 		if (nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
 			dirty_thresh)
 				break;
+		if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
+		    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io))
+			break;
 
 		if (!dirty_exceeded)
 			dirty_exceeded = 1;

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 19:04 +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:32:36PM -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > In my testing, a unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system.
> > This is not seen in 2.4.
> > 
> > I started 20 threads doing I/O on a NFS share. They are just doing 4K
> > writes in a loop.
> > 
> > Now I stop NFS server hosting the NFS share and start a
> > "dd" process to write a file on local EXT3 file system.
> > 
> > # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000
> > 
> > This process never progresses.
> 
> Peter, do you think this patch will help?

In another sub-thread:

> It's works on .23-rc8-mm2 with out any problems.
> 
> "dd" process does not hang any more.
> 
> Thanks for all the help.
> 
> Cheers
> --Chakri

So the per-bdi dirty patches that are in -mm already fix the problem.

> ===
> writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on light-load bdi
> 
> On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
> light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than enough dirty data.
> 
> The problem case:
> 
> 0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
>    sdb/nr_dirty == 0
> 1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
> 2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
> 3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
> 4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time as long as sda is overloaded
> 
> Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
> (In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
> But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)
> 
> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
> ---
>  mm/page-writeback.c |    3 +++
>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
> 
> --- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
> +++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
> @@ -227,6 +227,9 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
>  		if (nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
>  			dirty_thresh)
>  				break;
> +		if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
> +		    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io))
> +			break;
>  
>  		if (!dirty_exceeded)
>  			dirty_exceeded = 1;
> 

On the patch itself, not sure if it would have been enough. As soon as
there is a single dirty inode on the list one would get caught in the
same problem as before.

That is, if NFS_dirty+NFS_unstable+NFS_writeback > dirty_limit this
break won't fix it.

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Fengguang Wu]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2007 at 01:48:01PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 19:04 +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:32:36PM -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > In my testing, a unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system.
> > > This is not seen in 2.4.
> > > 
> > > I started 20 threads doing I/O on a NFS share. They are just doing 4K
> > > writes in a loop.
> > > 
> > > Now I stop NFS server hosting the NFS share and start a
> > > "dd" process to write a file on local EXT3 file system.
> > > 
> > > # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000
> > > 
> > > This process never progresses.
> > 
> > Peter, do you think this patch will help?
> 
> In another sub-thread:
> 
> > It's works on .23-rc8-mm2 with out any problems.
> > 
> > "dd" process does not hang any more.
> > 
> > Thanks for all the help.
> > 
> > Cheers
> > --Chakri
> 
> So the per-bdi dirty patches that are in -mm already fix the problem.

That's good.
But still it could be a good candidate for 2.6.22.x or even 2.6.23.

> > ===
> > writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on light-load bdi
> > 
> > On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
> > light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than enough dirty data.
> > 
> > The problem case:
> > 
> > 0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
> >    sdb/nr_dirty == 0
> > 1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
> > 2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
> > 3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
> > 4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time as long as sda is overloaded
> > 
> > Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
> > (In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
> > But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)
> > 
> > Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> > Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
> > ---
> >  mm/page-writeback.c |    3 +++
> >  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
> > 
> > --- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
> > +++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
> > @@ -227,6 +227,9 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
> >  		if (nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
> >  			dirty_thresh)
> >  				break;
> > +		if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
> > +		    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io))
> > +			break;
> >  
> >  		if (!dirty_exceeded)
> >  			dirty_exceeded = 1;
> > 
> 
> On the patch itself, not sure if it would have been enough. As soon as
> there is a single dirty inode on the list one would get caught in the
> same problem as before.

That should not be a problem.  Normally the few new dirty inodes will
be all cleaned in one go and there are no more dirty inodes left(at
least for a moment). Hmm, I guess the new 'break' should be moved
immediately after writeback_inodes()...

> That is, if NFS_dirty+NFS_unstable+NFS_writeback > dirty_limit this
> break won't fix it.

In fact this patch exactly targets at this condition.
When NFS* < dirty_limit, Chakri won't see the lockup at all.
The problem was, there are only two 'break's in the loop, and neither
one evaluates to true for his dd command.

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 20:28 +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2007 at 01:48:01PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> > On the patch itself, not sure if it would have been enough. As soon as
> > there is a single dirty inode on the list one would get caught in the
> > same problem as before.
> 
> That should not be a problem.  Normally the few new dirty inodes will
> be all cleaned in one go and there are no more dirty inodes left(at
> least for a moment). Hmm, I guess the new 'break' should be moved
> immediately after writeback_inodes()...
> 
> > That is, if NFS_dirty+NFS_unstable+NFS_writeback > dirty_limit this
> > break won't fix it.
> 
> In fact this patch exactly targets at this condition.
> When NFS* < dirty_limit, Chakri won't see the lockup at all.
> The problem was, there are only two 'break's in the loop, and neither
> one evaluates to true for his dd command.

Yeah indeed, when put in the loop, after writeback_inodes() it makes
sense.

No idea what I was thinking, must be one of those days... :-/

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Chuck Ebbert]

On 09/29/2007 07:04 AM, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:32:36PM -0700, Chakri n wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In my testing, a unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system.
>> This is not seen in 2.4.
>>
>> I started 20 threads doing I/O on a NFS share. They are just doing 4K
>> writes in a loop.
>>
>> Now I stop NFS server hosting the NFS share and start a
>> "dd" process to write a file on local EXT3 file system.
>>
>> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000
>>
>> This process never progresses.
> 
> Peter, do you think this patch will help?
> 
> ===
> writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on light-load bdi
> 
> On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
> light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than enough dirty data.
> 
> The problem case:
> 
> 0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
>    sdb/nr_dirty == 0
> 1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
> 2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
> 3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
> 4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time as long as sda is overloaded
> 
> Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
> (In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
> But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)
> 
> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
> ---
>  mm/page-writeback.c |    3 +++
>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
> 
> --- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
> +++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
> @@ -227,6 +227,9 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
>  		if (nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
>  			dirty_thresh)
>  				break;
> +		if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
> +		    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io))
> +			break;
>  
>  		if (!dirty_exceeded)
>  			dirty_exceeded = 1;
> 

This looks better than the other candidate to fix the problem. Are we going
to fix 2.6.23 before release? Multiple people have reported this problem now...

[PATCH] writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

[Fengguang Wu]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 11:57:34AM -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
> On 09/29/2007 07:04 AM, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:32:36PM -0700, Chakri n wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> In my testing, a unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system.
> >> This is not seen in 2.4.
> >>
> >> I started 20 threads doing I/O on a NFS share. They are just doing 4K
> >> writes in a loop.
> >>
> >> Now I stop NFS server hosting the NFS share and start a
> >> "dd" process to write a file on local EXT3 file system.
> >>
> >> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x count=1000
> >>
> >> This process never progresses.
> > 
> > Peter, do you think this patch will help?
> > 
> > ===
> > writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on light-load bdi
[...] 
> This looks better than the other candidate to fix the problem. Are we going
> to fix 2.6.23 before release? Multiple people have reported this problem now...

(expecting real world confirmations...)

Here is a new safer version.  It's more ugly though.

---
writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than available dirty data.

The problem case:

0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
   sdb/nr_dirty == 0
1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time

Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
(In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)

But the newly introduced 'break' could make the nr_writeback drift away
above the dirty limit. The workaround is to limit the error under 1MB.

Cc: Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
---
 mm/page-writeback.c |    5 +++++
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+)

--- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -250,6 +250,11 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
 			pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
 			if (pages_written >= write_chunk)
 				break;		/* We've done our duty */
+			if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
+			    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io) &&
+			    nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
+				    dirty_thresh + (1 << (20-PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT)))
+				break;
 		}
 		congestion_wait(WRITE, HZ/10);
 	}

Re: [PATCH] writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

[Andrew Morton]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 10:00:40 +0800 Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn> wrote:

> writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi
> 
> On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
> light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than available dirty data.
> 
> The problem case:
> 
> 0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
>    sdb/nr_dirty == 0
> 1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
> 2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
> 3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
> 4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time

Please quantify loooong.
 
> Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
> (In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
> But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)
> 
> But the newly introduced 'break' could make the nr_writeback drift away
> above the dirty limit. The workaround is to limit the error under 1MB.

I'm still not sure that we fully understand this yet.

If the sdb writer is stuck in balance_dirty_pages() then all sda writers
will be in balance_dirty_pages() too, madly writing stuff out to sda.  And
pdflush will be writing out sda as well.  All this writeout to sda should
release the sdb writer.

Why isn't this happening?


> Cc: Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@redhat.com>
> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
> ---
>  mm/page-writeback.c |    5 +++++
>  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+)
> 
> --- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
> +++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
> @@ -250,6 +250,11 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
>  			pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
>  			if (pages_written >= write_chunk)
>  				break;		/* We've done our duty */
> +			if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
> +			    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io) &&
> +			    nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
> +				    dirty_thresh + (1 << (20-PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT)))
> +				break;
>  		}
>  		congestion_wait(WRITE, HZ/10);
>  	}

Well that has a nice safetly net.  Perhaps it could fail a bit later on,
but that depends on why it's failing.

How well tested was this?

If we merge this for 2.6.23 then I expect that we'll immediately unmerge it
for 2.6.24 because Peter's stuff fixes this problem by other means.

Do we all agree with the above sentence?

Re: [PATCH] writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

[Fengguang Wu]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 07:14:57PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 10:00:40 +0800 Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn> wrote:
> 
> > writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi
> > 
> > On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
> > light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than available dirty data.
> > 
> > The problem case:
> > 
> > 0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
> >    sdb/nr_dirty == 0
> > 1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
> > 2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
> > 3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
> > 4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time
> 
> Please quantify loooong.

There're only two 'break' conditions in the loop:
1. nr_dirty + nr_unstable + nr_writeback < dirty_limit
   => *mostly* FALSE for a busy system
   => *always* FALSE in Chakri's stucked NFS case
2. nr_written >= 6MB
   for a light-load bdi:
   => *never* TRUE until there comes many new writers, contributing
      more dirty pages to sync
   => more worse, those new writers will also stuck here...
      the obvious unbalance here is:
           each writer contributes only 32KB new dirty pages, but
           want to consume (not necessarily available) 6MB

So loooong = min(global-less-busy-time, bdi-many-new-writers-arrival-time).

> > Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
> > (In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
> > But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)
> > 
> > But the newly introduced 'break' could make the nr_writeback drift away
> > above the dirty limit. The workaround is to limit the error under 1MB.
> 
> I'm still not sure that we fully understand this yet.
> 
> If the sdb writer is stuck in balance_dirty_pages() then all sda writers
> will be in balance_dirty_pages() too, madly writing stuff out to sda.  And
> pdflush will be writing out sda as well.  All this writeout to sda should
> release the sdb writer.
> 
> Why isn't this happening?

You are right in the reasoning. The exact consequence is:
        the light-load sdb is made as _unresponsive_ as the busy sda

Hence Chakri's case: whenever NFS is stuck, every device get stuck.

> 
> > Cc: Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@redhat.com>
> > Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> > Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
> > ---
> >  mm/page-writeback.c |    5 +++++
> >  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+)
> > 
> > --- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
> > +++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
> > @@ -250,6 +250,11 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
> >  			pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
> >  			if (pages_written >= write_chunk)
> >  				break;		/* We've done our duty */
> > +			if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
> > +			    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io) &&
> > +			    nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
> > +				    dirty_thresh + (1 << (20-PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT)))
> > +				break;
> >  		}
> >  		congestion_wait(WRITE, HZ/10);
> >  	}
> 
> Well that has a nice safetly net.  Perhaps it could fail a bit later on,
> but that depends on why it's failing.

In theory, every CPU/paralle writer could contribute 8 pages of error.
Hence we get 1MB/32KB = 32 (CPUs/writers).

One more serious problem is, a busy writer could also drain all the
dirty pages and make (nr_writeback == dirty_limit+1MB). In that case,
I suspect the light-load sdb writer still have good chance to
make progress(need confirmation).

> How well tested was this?

Not well tested till now. My system becomes unusable soon after
starting the NFS write(even before plugging the network). I'm seeing
large latencies in try_to_wake_up(). Hope that Ingo could help it out.

> If we merge this for 2.6.23 then I expect that we'll immediately unmerge it
> for 2.6.24 because Peter's stuff fixes this problem by other means.
> 
> Do we all agree with the above sentence?

Yeah, Peter and me were both aware of the timing.
This patch is only meant for 2.6.23 and 2.6.22.10.

Fengguang

Re: [PATCH] writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

[Fengguang Wu]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 08:13:27PM +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
[...]
> One more serious problem is, a busy writer could also drain all the
> dirty pages and make (nr_writeback == dirty_limit+1MB). In that case,
> I suspect the light-load sdb writer still have good chance to
> make progress(need confirmation).

Well it seems to be a really tricky issue without knowing the per-bdi
numbers. Maybe we could just encourage users to upgrade to 2.6.24...

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Peter Zijlstra]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 7430 bytes --]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:16 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

> (Searches for the lockstat documentation)
> 
> Did we forget to do that?

yeah,...

/me quickly whips up something

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
---
 Documentation/lockstat.txt |  119 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 119 insertions(+)

Index: linux-2.6/Documentation/lockstat.txt
===================================================================
--- /dev/null
+++ linux-2.6/Documentation/lockstat.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,119 @@
+
+LOCK STATISTICS
+
+- WHAT
+
+As the name suggests, it provides statistics on locks.
+
+- WHY
+
+Because things like lock contention can severely impact performance.
+
+- HOW
+
+Lockdep already has hooks in the lock functions and maps lock instances to
+lock classes. We build on that. The graph below shows the relation between
+the lock functions and the various hooks therein.
+
+        __acquire
+            |
+           lock _____
+            |        \
+            |    __contended
+            |         |
+            |       <wait>
+            | _______/
+            |/
+            |
+       __acquired
+            |
+            .
+          <hold>
+            .
+            |
+       __release
+            |
+         unlock
+
+lock, unlock	- the regular lock functions
+__*		- the hooks
+<> 		- states
+
+With these hooks we provide the following statistics:
+
+ con-bounces		- number of lock contention that involved x-cpu data
+ contentions            - number of lock acquisitions that had to wait
+ wait time min          - shortest (non 0) time we ever had to wait for a lock
+           max          - longest time we ever had to wait for a lock
+           total        - total time we spend waiting on this lock
+ acq-bounes             - number of lock acquisitions that involved x-cpu data
+ acquisitions		- number of times we took the lock
+ hold time min		- shortest (non 0) time we ever held the lock
+           max		- longest time we ever held the lock
+           total	- total time this lock was held
+
+From these number various other statistics can be derived, such as:
+
+ hold time average = hold time total / acquisitions
+
+These numbers are gathered per lock class, per read/write state (when
+applicable).
+
+It also tracks (4) contention points per class. A contention point is a call
+site that had to wait on lock acquisition.
+
+ - USAGE
+
+Look at the current lock statistics:
+
+(line numbers not part of actual output, done for clarity in the explanation below)
+
+# less /proc/lock_stat
+
+01 lock_stat version 0.2
+02 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+03                               class name    con-bounces    contentions   waittime-min   waittime-max waittime-total    acq-bounces   acquisitions   holdtime-min   holdtime-max holdtime-total
+04 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+05
+06               &inode->i_data.tree_lock-W:            15          21657           0.18     1093295.30 11547131054.85             58          10415           0.16          87.51        6387.60
+07               &inode->i_data.tree_lock-R:             0              0           0.00           0.00           0.00          23302         231198           0.25           8.45       98023.38
+08               --------------------------
+09                 &inode->i_data.tree_lock              0          [<ffffffff8027c08f>] add_to_page_cache+0x5f/0x190
+10
+11 ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
+12
+13                              dcache_lock:          1037           1161           0.38          45.32         774.51           6611         243371           0.15         306.48       77387.24
+14                              -----------
+15                              dcache_lock            180          [<ffffffff802c0d7e>] sys_getcwd+0x11e/0x230
+16                              dcache_lock            165          [<ffffffff802c002a>] d_alloc+0x15a/0x210
+17                              dcache_lock             33          [<ffffffff8035818d>] _atomic_dec_and_lock+0x4d/0x70
+18                              dcache_lock              1          [<ffffffff802beef8>] shrink_dcache_parent+0x18/0x130
+
+This except shows the first two lock class statistics. Line 01 shows the output
+version - each time the format changes this will be updated. Line 02-04 show
+the header with column descriptions. Lines 05-10 and 13-18 show the actual
+statistics. These statistics come in two parts; the actual stats separated by a
+short separator (line 08, 14) from the contention points.
+
+The first lock (05-10) is a read/write lock, and shows two lines above the
+short separator. The contention points don't match the column descriptors,
+they have two: contentions and [<IP>] symbol.
+
+
+View the top contending locks:
+
+# grep : /proc/lock_stat | head
+              &inode->i_data.tree_lock-W:            15          21657           0.18     1093295.30 11547131054.85             58          10415           0.16          87.51        6387.60
+              &inode->i_data.tree_lock-R:             0              0           0.00           0.00           0.00          23302         231198           0.25           8.45       98023.38
+                             dcache_lock:          1037           1161           0.38          45.32         774.51           6611         243371           0.15         306.48       77387.24
+                         &inode->i_mutex:           161            286 18446744073709       62882.54     1244614.55           3653          20598 18446744073709       62318.60     1693822.74
+                         &zone->lru_lock:            94             94           0.53           7.33          92.10           4366          32690           0.29          59.81       16350.06
+              &inode->i_data.i_mmap_lock:            79             79           0.40           3.77          53.03          11779          87755           0.28         116.93       29898.44
+                        &q->__queue_lock:            48             50           0.52          31.62          86.31            774          13131           0.17         113.08       12277.52
+                        &rq->rq_lock_key:            43             47           0.74          68.50         170.63           3706          33929           0.22         107.99       17460.62
+                      &rq->rq_lock_key#2:            39             46           0.75           6.68          49.03           2979          32292           0.17         125.17       17137.63
+                         tasklist_lock-W:            15             15           1.45          10.87          32.70           1201           7390           0.58          62.55       13648.47
+
+Clear the statistics:
+
+# echo 0 > /proc/lock_stat


[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 189 bytes --]

Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

[Randy Dunlap]

On Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:36:01 +0200 Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:16 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > (Searches for the lockstat documentation)
> > 
> > Did we forget to do that?
> 
> yeah,...
> 
> /me quickly whips up something

Thanks.  Just some typos noted below.


> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> ---
>  Documentation/lockstat.txt |  119 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 119 insertions(+)
> 
> Index: linux-2.6/Documentation/lockstat.txt
> ===================================================================
> --- /dev/null
> +++ linux-2.6/Documentation/lockstat.txt
> @@ -0,0 +1,119 @@
> +
> +LOCK STATISTICS
> +
> +- WHAT
> +
> +As the name suggests, it provides statistics on locks.
> +
> +- WHY
> +
> +Because things like lock contention can severely impact performance.
> +
> +- HOW
> +
> +Lockdep already has hooks in the lock functions and maps lock instances to
> +lock classes. We build on that. The graph below shows the relation between
> +the lock functions and the various hooks therein.
> +
> +        __acquire
> +            |
> +           lock _____
> +            |        \
> +            |    __contended
> +            |         |
> +            |       <wait>
> +            | _______/
> +            |/
> +            |
> +       __acquired
> +            |
> +            .
> +          <hold>
> +            .
> +            |
> +       __release
> +            |
> +         unlock
> +
> +lock, unlock	- the regular lock functions
> +__*		- the hooks
> +<> 		- states
> +
> +With these hooks we provide the following statistics:
> +
> + con-bounces		- number of lock contention that involved x-cpu data
> + contentions            - number of lock acquisitions that had to wait
> + wait time min          - shortest (non 0) time we ever had to wait for a lock

                                      (non-0)

> +           max          - longest time we ever had to wait for a lock
> +           total        - total time we spend waiting on this lock
> + acq-bounes             - number of lock acquisitions that involved x-cpu data

       -bounces

> + acquisitions		- number of times we took the lock
> + hold time min		- shortest (non 0) time we ever held the lock

                                           (non-0)

> +           max		- longest time we ever held the lock
> +           total	- total time this lock was held
> +
> +From these number various other statistics can be derived, such as:
> +
> + hold time average = hold time total / acquisitions
> +
> +These numbers are gathered per lock class, per read/write state (when
> +applicable).
> +
> +It also tracks (4) contention points per class. A contention point is a call
> +site that had to wait on lock acquisition.
> +
> + - USAGE
> +
> +Look at the current lock statistics:
> +
> +(line numbers not part of actual output, done for clarity in the explanation below)
> +
> +# less /proc/lock_stat
> +
> +01 lock_stat version 0.2
> +02 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> +03                               class name    con-bounces    contentions   waittime-min   waittime-max waittime-total    acq-bounces   acquisitions   holdtime-min   holdtime-max holdtime-total
> +04 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...
> +15                              dcache_lock            180          [<ffffffff802c0d7e>] sys_getcwd+0x11e/0x230
> +16                              dcache_lock            165          [<ffffffff802c002a>] d_alloc+0x15a/0x210
> +17                              dcache_lock             33          [<ffffffff8035818d>] _atomic_dec_and_lock+0x4d/0x70
> +18                              dcache_lock              1          [<ffffffff802beef8>] shrink_dcache_parent+0x18/0x130
> +
> +This except shows the first two lock class statistics. Line 01 shows the output

        excerpt

> +version - each time the format changes this will be updated. Line 02-04 show
> +the header with column descriptions. Lines 05-10 and 13-18 show the actual
> +statistics. These statistics come in two parts; the actual stats separated by a
> +short separator (line 08, 14) from the contention points.
> +
> +The first lock (05-10) is a read/write lock, and shows two lines above the
> +short separator. The contention points don't match the column descriptors,
> +they have two: contentions and [<IP>] symbol.
...

---
~Randy

Re: [PATCH] writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

[Chuck Ebbert]

On 10/02/2007 09:27 AM, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 08:13:27PM +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> [...]
>> One more serious problem is, a busy writer could also drain all the
>> dirty pages and make (nr_writeback == dirty_limit+1MB). In that case,
>> I suspect the light-load sdb writer still have good chance to
>> make progress(need confirmation).
> 
> Well it seems to be a really tricky issue without knowing the per-bdi
> numbers. Maybe we could just encourage users to upgrade to 2.6.24...
> 

Yeah, and if that doesn't work there's always 2.6.25... :/

[PATCH] lockstat: documentation

[Peter Zijlstra]

Thanks Randy!

update patch below.

---
Subject: lockstat: documentation

Provide some documentation for CONFIG_LOCK_STAT

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
---
 Documentation/lockstat.txt |  120 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 lib/Kconfig.debug          |    2 
 2 files changed, 122 insertions(+)

Index: linux-2.6/Documentation/lockstat.txt
===================================================================
--- /dev/null
+++ linux-2.6/Documentation/lockstat.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,120 @@
+
+LOCK STATISTICS
+
+- WHAT
+
+As the name suggests, it provides statistics on locks.
+
+- WHY
+
+Because things like lock contention can severely impact performance.
+
+- HOW
+
+Lockdep already has hooks in the lock functions and maps lock instances to
+lock classes. We build on that. The graph below shows the relation between
+the lock functions and the various hooks therein.
+
+        __acquire
+            |
+           lock _____
+            |        \
+            |    __contended
+            |         |
+            |       <wait>
+            | _______/
+            |/
+            |
+       __acquired
+            |
+            .
+          <hold>
+            .
+            |
+       __release
+            |
+         unlock
+
+lock, unlock	- the regular lock functions
+__*		- the hooks
+<> 		- states
+
+With these hooks we provide the following statistics:
+
+ con-bounces       - number of lock contention that involved x-cpu data
+ contentions       - number of lock acquisitions that had to wait
+ wait time min     - shortest (non-0) time we ever had to wait for a lock
+           max     - longest time we ever had to wait for a lock
+           total   - total time we spend waiting on this lock
+ acq-bounces       - number of lock acquisitions that involved x-cpu data
+ acquisitions      - number of times we took the lock
+ hold time min     - shortest (non-0) time we ever held the lock
+           max     - longest time we ever held the lock
+           total   - total time this lock was held
+
+From these number various other statistics can be derived, such as:
+
+ hold time average = hold time total / acquisitions
+
+These numbers are gathered per lock class, per read/write state (when
+applicable).
+
+It also tracks 4 contention points per class. A contention point is a call site
+that had to wait on lock acquisition.
+
+ - USAGE
+
+Look at the current lock statistics:
+
+( line numbers not part of actual output, done for clarity in the explanation
+  below )
+
+# less /proc/lock_stat
+
+01 lock_stat version 0.2
+02 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+03                               class name    con-bounces    contentions   waittime-min   waittime-max waittime-total    acq-bounces   acquisitions   holdtime-min   holdtime-max holdtime-total
+04 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+05
+06               &inode->i_data.tree_lock-W:            15          21657           0.18     1093295.30 11547131054.85             58          10415           0.16          87.51        6387.60
+07               &inode->i_data.tree_lock-R:             0              0           0.00           0.00           0.00          23302         231198           0.25           8.45       98023.38
+08               --------------------------
+09                 &inode->i_data.tree_lock              0          [<ffffffff8027c08f>] add_to_page_cache+0x5f/0x190
+10
+11 ...............................................................................................................................................................................................
+12
+13                              dcache_lock:          1037           1161           0.38          45.32         774.51           6611         243371           0.15         306.48       77387.24
+14                              -----------
+15                              dcache_lock            180          [<ffffffff802c0d7e>] sys_getcwd+0x11e/0x230
+16                              dcache_lock            165          [<ffffffff802c002a>] d_alloc+0x15a/0x210
+17                              dcache_lock             33          [<ffffffff8035818d>] _atomic_dec_and_lock+0x4d/0x70
+18                              dcache_lock              1          [<ffffffff802beef8>] shrink_dcache_parent+0x18/0x130
+
+This excerpt shows the first two lock class statistics. Line 01 shows the
+output version - each time the format changes this will be updated. Line 02-04
+show the header with column descriptions. Lines 05-10 and 13-18 show the actual
+statistics. These statistics come in two parts; the actual stats separated by a
+short separator (line 08, 14) from the contention points.
+
+The first lock (05-10) is a read/write lock, and shows two lines above the
+short separator. The contention points don't match the column descriptors,
+they have two: contentions and [<IP>] symbol.
+
+
+View the top contending locks:
+
+# grep : /proc/lock_stat | head
+              &inode->i_data.tree_lock-W:            15          21657           0.18     1093295.30 11547131054.85             58          10415           0.16          87.51        6387.60
+              &inode->i_data.tree_lock-R:             0              0           0.00           0.00           0.00          23302         231198           0.25           8.45       98023.38
+                             dcache_lock:          1037           1161           0.38          45.32         774.51           6611         243371           0.15         306.48       77387.24
+                         &inode->i_mutex:           161            286 18446744073709       62882.54     1244614.55           3653          20598 18446744073709       62318.60     1693822.74
+                         &zone->lru_lock:            94             94           0.53           7.33          92.10           4366          32690           0.29          59.81       16350.06
+              &inode->i_data.i_mmap_lock:            79             79           0.40           3.77          53.03          11779          87755           0.28         116.93       29898.44
+                        &q->__queue_lock:            48             50           0.52          31.62          86.31            774          13131           0.17         113.08       12277.52
+                        &rq->rq_lock_key:            43             47           0.74          68.50         170.63           3706          33929           0.22         107.99       17460.62
+                      &rq->rq_lock_key#2:            39             46           0.75           6.68          49.03           2979          32292           0.17         125.17       17137.63
+                         tasklist_lock-W:            15             15           1.45          10.87          32.70           1201           7390           0.58          62.55       13648.47
+
+Clear the statistics:
+
+# echo 0 > /proc/lock_stat
Index: linux-2.6/lib/Kconfig.debug
===================================================================
--- linux-2.6.orig/lib/Kconfig.debug
+++ linux-2.6/lib/Kconfig.debug
@@ -309,6 +309,8 @@ config LOCK_STAT
 	help
 	 This feature enables tracking lock contention points
 
+	 For more details, see Documentation/lockstat.txt
+
 config DEBUG_LOCKDEP
 	bool "Lock dependency engine debugging"
 	depends on DEBUG_KERNEL && LOCKDEP

Re: [PATCH] lockstat: documentation

[Ingo Molnar]

* Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:

> Thanks Randy!
> 
> update patch below.
> 
> ---
> Subject: lockstat: documentation
> 
> Provide some documentation for CONFIG_LOCK_STAT
> 
> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>

Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

	Ingo

Re: [PATCH] writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

[richard kennedy]

On Tue, 2007-10-02 at 10:00 +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 11:57:34AM -0400, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
> > On 09/29/2007 07:04 AM, Fengguang Wu wrote:
...
> 
> (expecting real world confirmations...)
> 
> Here is a new safer version.  It's more ugly though.
> 
> ---
> writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi
> 
> On a busy-writing system, a writer could be hold up infinitely on a
> light-load device. It will be trying to sync more than available dirty data.
> 
> The problem case:
> 
> 0. sda/nr_dirty >= dirty_limit;
>    sdb/nr_dirty == 0
> 1. dd writes 32 pages on sdb
> 2. balance_dirty_pages() blocks dd, and tries to write 6MB.
> 3. it never gets there: there's only 128KB dirty data.
> 4. dd may be blocked for a loooong time
> 
> Fix it by returning on 'zero dirty inodes' in the current bdi.
> (In fact there are slight differences between 'dirty inodes' and 'dirty pages'.
> But there is no available counters for 'dirty pages'.)
> 
> But the newly introduced 'break' could make the nr_writeback drift away
> above the dirty limit. The workaround is to limit the error under 1MB.
> 
> Cc: Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@redhat.com>
> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
> Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
> ---
>  mm/page-writeback.c |    5 +++++
>  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+)
> 
> --- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
> +++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
> @@ -250,6 +250,11 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
>  			pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
>  			if (pages_written >= write_chunk)
>  				break;		/* We've done our duty */
> +			if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
> +			    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io) &&
> +			    nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
> +				    dirty_thresh + (1 << (20-PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT)))
> +				break;
>  		}
>  		congestion_wait(WRITE, HZ/10);
>  	}

I've been testing 2.6.23-rc9 + this patch all morning but have just seen
a lockup. As usual it happened  just after a large file copy finished
and while nr_dirty is still large. I'm sorry to say I didn't have a
serial console running so I don't have an other info. I will try again
and see if I can capture some more data.

I did notice that at the beginning of my tests the dirty blocks are
written back more quickly than usual

nr_dirty count after the copy finished and then 60 seconds later :-
after copy	+60 seconds
73520		0
73533		0
68554		1
 
but after several iterations of my testcase & just before the lockup
68560		57165
71974		62896
 
which is about the same as a unpatched kernel.

Richard
   

Re: [PATCH] writeback: avoid possible balance_dirty_pages() lockup on a light-load bdi

[Fengguang Wu]

On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 01:46:52PM +0100, richard kennedy wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-10-02 at 10:00 +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> > ---
> >  mm/page-writeback.c |    5 +++++
> >  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+)
> > 
> > --- linux-2.6.22.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
> > +++ linux-2.6.22/mm/page-writeback.c
> > @@ -250,6 +250,11 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
> >  			pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
> >  			if (pages_written >= write_chunk)
> >  				break;		/* We've done our duty */
> > +			if (list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_dirty) &&
> > +			    list_empty(&mapping->host->i_sb->s_io) &&
> > +			    nr_reclaimable + global_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <=
> > +				    dirty_thresh + (1 << (20-PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT)))
> > +				break;
> >  		}
> >  		congestion_wait(WRITE, HZ/10);
> >  	}
> 
> I've been testing 2.6.23-rc9 + this patch all morning but have just seen
> a lockup. As usual it happened  just after a large file copy finished
> and while nr_dirty is still large. I'm sorry to say I didn't have a
> serial console running so I don't have an other info. I will try again
> and see if I can capture some more data.
> 
> I did notice that at the beginning of my tests the dirty blocks are
> written back more quickly than usual
> 
> nr_dirty count after the copy finished and then 60 seconds later :-
> after copy	+60 seconds
> 73520		0
> 73533		0
> 68554		1
>  
> but after several iterations of my testcase & just before the lockup
> 68560		57165
> 71974		62896
>  
> which is about the same as a unpatched kernel.

Hi Richard,

Thank you for the testing.

However, my patch is kind of duplicate efforts. I was taking the
'do it if simple' attitude.  I can continue to improve it if you 
really want it. Otherwise I'd recommend you to test the coming
2.6.24-rc1 or backport the -mm writeback patches back to 2.6.23 and
test it there. Peter has did a good job on it.

Fengguang