From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> throttle_vm_writeout has been introduced back in 2005 to fix OOMs caused by excessive pageout activity during the reclaim. Too many pages could be put under writeback therefore LRUs would be full of unreclaimable pages until the IO completes and in turn the OOM killer could be invoked. There have been some important changes introduced since then in the reclaim path though. Writers are throttled by balance_dirty_pages when initiating the buffered IO and later during the memory pressure, the direct reclaim is throttled by wait_iff_congested if the node is considered congested by dirty pages on LRUs and the underlying bdi is congested by the queued IO. The kswapd is throttled as well if it encounters pages marked for immediate reclaim or under writeback which signals that that there are too many pages under writeback already. Finally should_reclaim_retry does congestion_wait if the reclaim cannot make any progress and there are too many dirty/writeback pages. Another important aspect is that we do not issue any IO from the direct reclaim context anymore. In a heavy parallel load this could queue a lot of IO which would be very scattered and thus unefficient which would just make the problem worse. This three mechanisms should throttle and keep the amount of IO in a steady state even under heavy IO and memory pressure so yet another throttling point doesn't really seem helpful. Quite contrary, Mikulas Patocka has reported that swap backed by dm-crypt doesn't work properly because the swapout IO cannot make sufficient progress as the writeout path depends on dm_crypt worker which has to allocate memory to perform the encryption. In order to guarantee a forward progress it relies on the mempool allocator. mempool_alloc(), however, prefers to use the underlying (usually page) allocator before it grabs objects from the pool. Such an allocation can dive into the memory reclaim and consequently to throttle_vm_writeout. If there are too many dirty or pages under writeback it will get throttled even though it is in fact a flusher to clear pending pages. [ 345.352536] kworker/u4:0 D ffff88003df7f438 10488 6 2 0x00000000 [ 345.352536] Workqueue: kcryptd kcryptd_crypt [dm_crypt] [ 345.352536] ffff88003df7f438 ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003e5d8e80 [ 345.352536] ffff88003dfb3240 ffff88003df73240 ffff88003df80000 ffff88003df7f470 [ 345.352536] ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003df7f828 ffff88003df7f450 [ 345.352536] Call Trace: [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff818d466c>] schedule+0x3c/0x90 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff818d96a8>] schedule_timeout+0x1d8/0x360 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81135e40>] ? detach_if_pending+0x1c0/0x1c0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811407c3>] ? ktime_get+0xb3/0x150 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811958cf>] ? __delayacct_blkio_start+0x1f/0x30 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff818d39e4>] io_schedule_timeout+0xa4/0x110 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff8121d886>] congestion_wait+0x86/0x1f0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff810fdf40>] ? prepare_to_wait_event+0xf0/0xf0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff812061d4>] throttle_vm_writeout+0x44/0xd0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81211533>] shrink_zone_memcg+0x613/0x720 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81211720>] shrink_zone+0xe0/0x300 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81211aed>] do_try_to_free_pages+0x1ad/0x450 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81211e7f>] try_to_free_pages+0xef/0x300 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811fef19>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x879/0x1210 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff810e8080>] ? sched_clock_cpu+0x90/0xc0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff8125a8d1>] alloc_pages_current+0xa1/0x1f0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81265ef5>] ? new_slab+0x3f5/0x6a0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81265dd7>] new_slab+0x2d7/0x6a0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff810e7f87>] ? sched_clock_local+0x17/0x80 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff812678cb>] ___slab_alloc+0x3fb/0x5c0 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811f71bd>] ? mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff810e7f87>] ? sched_clock_local+0x17/0x80 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811f71bd>] ? mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81267ae1>] __slab_alloc+0x51/0x90 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811f71bd>] ? mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff81267d9b>] kmem_cache_alloc+0x27b/0x310 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811f71bd>] mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff811f6f11>] mempool_alloc+0x91/0x230 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffff8141a02d>] bio_alloc_bioset+0xbd/0x260 [ 345.352536] [<ffffffffc02f1a54>] kcryptd_crypt+0x114/0x3b0 [dm_crypt] Let's just drop throttle_vm_writeout altogether. It is not very much helpful anymore. I have tried to test a potential writeback IO runaway similar to the one described in the original patch which has introduced that [1]. Small virtual machine (512MB RAM, 4 CPUs, 2G of swap space and disk image on a rather slow NFS in a sync mode on the host) with 8 parallel writers each writing 1G worth of data. As soon as the pagecache fills up and the direct reclaim hits then I start anon memory consumer in a loop (allocating 300M and exiting after populating it) in the background to make the memory pressure even stronger as well as to disrupt the steady state for the IO. The direct reclaim is throttled because of the congestion as well as kswapd hitting congestion_wait due to nr_immediate but throttle_vm_writeout doesn't ever trigger the sleep throughout the test. Dirty+writeback are close to nr_dirty_threshold with some fluctuations caused by the anon consumer. [1] https://www2.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.9-rc1/2.6.9-rc1-mm3/broken-out/vm-pageout-throttling.patch Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@xxxxxxxx> Cc: Ondrej Kozina <okozina@xxxxxxxxxx Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> --- Hi, I believe this is more a cleanup than a serious fix. Mikulas has reported [1] that the throttling is less severe after 4e390b2b2f34 ("Revert "mm, mempool: only set __GFP_NOMEMALLOC if there are free elements""). Anyway, I believe that this function has shown its age though and we should just get rid of it and make the throttling mechanisms used by page allocator/reclaim easier to follow. Mempool users believe that the page allocator shouldn't throttle their allocations at all but I think that this needs a deeper consideration so this is not addressed in this patch. [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.LRH.2.02.1608030853430.15274@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx include/linux/writeback.h | 1 - mm/page-writeback.c | 30 ------------------------------ mm/vmscan.c | 2 -- 3 files changed, 33 deletions(-) diff --git a/include/linux/writeback.h b/include/linux/writeback.h index fc1e16c25a29..797100e10010 100644 --- a/include/linux/writeback.h +++ b/include/linux/writeback.h @@ -319,7 +319,6 @@ void laptop_mode_timer_fn(unsigned long data); #else static inline void laptop_sync_completion(void) { } #endif -void throttle_vm_writeout(gfp_t gfp_mask); bool node_dirty_ok(struct pglist_data *pgdat); int wb_domain_init(struct wb_domain *dom, gfp_t gfp); #ifdef CONFIG_CGROUP_WRITEBACK diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c index f4cd7d8005c9..82e72524db55 100644 --- a/mm/page-writeback.c +++ b/mm/page-writeback.c @@ -1965,36 +1965,6 @@ bool wb_over_bg_thresh(struct bdi_writeback *wb) return false; } -void throttle_vm_writeout(gfp_t gfp_mask) -{ - unsigned long background_thresh; - unsigned long dirty_thresh; - - for ( ; ; ) { - global_dirty_limits(&background_thresh, &dirty_thresh); - dirty_thresh = hard_dirty_limit(&global_wb_domain, dirty_thresh); - - /* - * Boost the allowable dirty threshold a bit for page - * allocators so they don't get DoS'ed by heavy writers - */ - dirty_thresh += dirty_thresh / 10; /* wheeee... */ - - if (global_node_page_state(NR_UNSTABLE_NFS) + - global_node_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <= dirty_thresh) - break; - congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10); - - /* - * The caller might hold locks which can prevent IO completion - * or progress in the filesystem. So we cannot just sit here - * waiting for IO to complete. - */ - if ((gfp_mask & (__GFP_FS|__GFP_IO)) != (__GFP_FS|__GFP_IO)) - break; - } -} - /* * sysctl handler for /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs */ diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index f9b3112e963a..83203201c88b 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -2437,8 +2437,6 @@ static void shrink_node_memcg(struct pglist_data *pgdat, struct mem_cgroup *memc if (inactive_list_is_low(lruvec, false, sc)) shrink_active_list(SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX, lruvec, sc, LRU_ACTIVE_ANON); - - throttle_vm_writeout(sc->gfp_mask); } /* Use reclaim/compaction for costly allocs or under memory pressure */ -- 2.8.1 -- 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>