On Wed, 27 Jul 2016, Michal Hocko wrote: > On Wed 27-07-16 10:28:40, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > > > > > > On Wed, 27 Jul 2016, NeilBrown wrote: > > > > > On Tue, Jul 26 2016, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > > > > > > > On Sat, 23 Jul 2016, NeilBrown wrote: > > > > > > > >> "dirtying ... from the reclaim context" ??? What does that mean? > > > >> According to > > > >> Commit: 26eecbf3543b ("[PATCH] vm: pageout throttling") > > > >> From the history tree, the purpose of throttle_vm_writeout() is to > > > >> limit the amount of memory that is concurrently under I/O. > > > >> That seems strange to me because I thought it was the responsibility of > > > >> each backing device to impose a limit - a maximum queue size of some > > > >> sort. > > > > > > > > Device mapper doesn't impose any limit for in-flight bios. > > > > > > I would suggest that it probably should. At least it should > > > "set_wb_congested()" when the number of in-flight bios reaches some > > > arbitrary threshold. > > > > If we set the device mapper device as congested, it can again trigger that > > mempool alloc throttling bug. > > > > I.e. suppose that we swap to a dm-crypt device. The dm-crypt device > > becomes clogged and sets its state as congested. The underlying block > > device is not congested. > > > > The mempool_alloc function in the dm-crypt workqueue sets the > > PF_LESS_THROTTLE flag, and tries to allocate memory, but according to > > Michal's patches, processes with PF_LESS_THROTTLE may still get throttled. > > > > So if we set the dm-crypt device as congested, it can incorrectly throttle > > the dm-crypt workqueue that does allocations of temporary pages and > > encryption. > > > > I think that approach with PF_LESS_THROTTLE in mempool_alloc is incorrect > > and that mempool allocations should never be throttled. > > I'm not really sure this is the right approach. If a particular mempool > user cannot ever be throttled by the page allocator then it should > perform GFP_NOWAIT. Then, all block device drivers should have GFP_NOWAIT - which means that we can as well make it default. But GFP_NOWAIT also disables direct reclaim. We really want direct reclaim when allocating from mempool - we just don't want to throttle due to block device congestion. We could use __GFP_NORETRY as an indication that we don't want to sleep - or make a new flag __GFP_NO_THROTTLE. > Even mempool allocations shouldn't allow reclaim to > scan pages too quickly even when LRU lists are full of dirty pages. But > as I've said that would restrict the success rates even under light page > cache load. Throttling on the wait_iff_congested should be quite rare. > > Anyway do you see an excessive throttling with the patch posted > http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160725192344.GD2166@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ? Or from It didn't have much effect. Since the patch 4e390b2b2f34b8daaabf2df1df0cf8f798b87ddb (revert of the limitless mempool allocations), swapping to dm-crypt works in the simple example. > another side. Do you see an excessive number of dirty/writeback pages > wrt. the dirty threshold or any other undesirable side effects? > -- > Michal Hocko > SUSE Labs I also got got dmcrypt stalled in bt_get when submitting I/Os to the underlying virtio device. I don't know what could be done about it. [ 30.441074] dmcrypt_write D ffff88003de7bba8 0 2155 2 0x00080000 [ 30.441956] ffff88003de7bba8 ffff88003de7be70 ffff88003de7c000 ffff88003fc34740 [ 30.442934] 7fffffffffffffff ffff88003fc3a680 ffff880037a911f8 ffff88003de7bbc0 [ 30.443969] ffffffff812770df 7fffffffffffffff ffff88003de7bc10 ffffffff81278ca7 [ 30.444926] Call Trace: [ 30.445232] [<ffffffff812770df>] schedule+0x83/0x98 [ 30.445825] [<ffffffff81278ca7>] schedule_timeout+0x2f/0xcf [ 30.446506] [<ffffffff81276c84>] io_schedule_timeout+0x64/0x90 [ 30.447235] [<ffffffff81276c84>] ? io_schedule_timeout+0x64/0x90 [ 30.448088] [<ffffffff8115787a>] bt_get+0x11a/0x1bc [ 30.448688] [<ffffffff8105ef86>] ? wake_up_atomic_t+0x25/0x25 [ 30.449392] [<ffffffff81157abb>] blk_mq_get_tag+0x7e/0x9b [ 30.450041] [<ffffffff81155066>] __blk_mq_alloc_request+0x1b/0x1e0 [ 30.450805] [<ffffffff81155ee8>] blk_mq_map_request+0xf6/0x136 [ 30.451516] [<ffffffff81156866>] blk_sq_make_request+0xac/0x173 [ 30.452322] [<ffffffff8114db56>] generic_make_request+0xb8/0x15b [ 30.453038] [<ffffffffa012ba65>] dmcrypt_write+0x13b/0x174 [dm_crypt] [ 30.453852] [<ffffffff81052779>] ? wake_up_q+0x42/0x42 [ 30.454508] [<ffffffffa012b92a>] ? crypt_iv_tcw_dtr+0x62/0x62 [dm_crypt] [ 30.455369] [<ffffffff8104dc6a>] kthread+0xa0/0xa8 [ 30.456041] [<ffffffff8104dc6a>] ? kthread+0xa0/0xa8 [ 30.456688] [<ffffffff8127999f>] ret_from_fork+0x1f/0x40 [ 30.457396] [<ffffffff8104dbca>] ? init_completion+0x24/0x24 Mikulas -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>