On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 09:24:33AM +0900, Minchan Kim wrote: >> Hi, Dave. >> >> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > From: Dave Chinner <dchinner@xxxxxxxxxx> >> > >> > When we enter direct reclaim we may have used an arbitrary amount of stack >> > space, and hence enterring the filesystem to do writeback can then lead to >> > stack overruns. This problem was recently encountered x86_64 systems with >> > 8k stacks running XFS with simple storage configurations. >> > >> > Writeback from direct reclaim also adversely affects background writeback. The >> > background flusher threads should already be taking care of cleaning dirty >> > pages, and direct reclaim will kick them if they aren't already doing work. If >> > direct reclaim is also calling ->writepage, it will cause the IO patterns from >> > the background flusher threads to be upset by LRU-order writeback from >> > pageout() which can be effectively random IO. Having competing sources of IO >> > trying to clean pages on the same backing device reduces throughput by >> > increasing the amount of seeks that the backing device has to do to write back >> > the pages. >> > >> > Hence for direct reclaim we should not allow ->writepages to be entered at all. >> > Set up the relevant scan_control structures to enforce this, and prevent >> > sc->may_writepage from being set in other places in the direct reclaim path in >> > response to other events. >> >> I think your solution is rather aggressive change as Mel and Kosaki >> already pointed out. > > It may be agressive, but writeback from direct reclaim is, IMO, one > of the worst aspects of the current VM design because of it's > adverse effect on the IO subsystem. Tend to agree. But De we need it by last resort if flusher thread can't catch up write stream? Or In my opinion, Could I/O layer have better throttle logic than now? > > I'd prefer to remove it completely that continue to try and patch > around it, especially given that everyone seems to agree that it > does have an adverse affect on IO... Of course, If everybody agree, we can do it. For it, we need many benchmark result which is very hard. Maybe I will help it in embedded system. > >> Do flush thread aware LRU of dirty pages in system level recency not >> dirty pages recency? > > It writes back in the order inodes were dirtied. i.e. the LRU is a > coarser measure, but it it still definitely there. It also takes > into account fairness of IO between dirty inodes, so no one dirty > inode prevents IO beining issued on a other dirty inodes on the > LRU... Thanks. It seems to be lost recency. I am not sure how much it affects system performance. > >> Of course flush thread can clean dirty pages faster than direct reclaimer. >> But if it don't aware LRUness, hot page thrashing can be happened by >> corner case. >> It could lost write merge. >> >> And non-rotation storage might be not big of seek cost. > > Non-rotational storage still goes faster when it is fed large, well > formed IOs. Agreed. I missed. Nand device is stronger than HDD about random read. But ramdom write is very weak in performance and wear-leveling. > >> I think we have to consider that case if we decide to change direct reclaim I/O. >> >> How do we separate the problem? >> >> 1. stack hogging problem. >> 2. direct reclaim random write. > > AFAICT, the only way to _reliably_ avoid the stack usage problem is > to avoid writeback in direct reclaim. That has the side effect of > fixing #2 as well, so do they really need separating? If we can do it, it's good. but 2. problem is not easy to fix, I think. Compared to 2, 1 is rather easy. So I thought we can solve 1 firstly and then focusing 2. If your suggestion is right, then we can apply your idea. Then we don't need to revert the patch of 1 since small stack usage is always good if we don't lost big performance. > > Cheers, > > Dave. > -- > Dave Chinner > david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > -- Kind regards, Minchan Kim -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>