Re: Local DoS through write heavy I/O on CFQ & Deadline

Michal Hocko
2012-10-12T13:30:48Z

On Thu 11-10-12 13:23:32, Alex Bligh wrote:
> We have noticed significant I/O scheduling issues on both the CFQ and the
> deadline scheduler where a non-root user can starve any other process of
> any I/O for minutes at a time. The problem is more serious using CFQ but is
> still an effective local DoS vector using Deadline.
>
> A simple way to generate the problem is:
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=- bs=1M count=50000 | dd if=- of=myfile bs=1M count=50000
>
[...]
>
> Full info, including logs and scripts can be found at:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1064521

You seem to have 8G of RAM and dirty_ratio=20 resp.
dirty_background_ratio=10 which means that 1.5G worth of dirty data
until writer gets throttled which is a lot. Background writeback starts
at 800M which is probably not sufficient as well. Have you tried to set
dirty_bytes at a reasonable value (wrt. to your storage)?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs