On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 5:26 AM, Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed 19-10-11 22:59:55, Andy Lutomirski wrote: >> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> > On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:15 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:02 PM, Andreas Dilger <adilger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >>> What kernel are you using? A change to keep pages consistent during writeout was landed not too long ago (maybe Linux 3.0) in order to allow checksumming of the data. >> >> >> >> 3.0.6, with no relevant patches. (I have a one-liner added to the tcp >> >> code that I'll submit sometime soon.) Would this explain the latency >> >> in file_update_time or is that a separate issue? file_update_time >> >> seems like a good thing to make fully asynchronous (especially if the >> >> file in question is a fifo, but I've already moved my fifos to tmpfs). >> > >> > On 2.6.39.4, I got one instance of: >> > >> > call_rwsem_down_read_failed ext4_map_blocks ext4_da_get_block_prep >> > __block_write_begin ext4_da_write_begin ext4_page_mkwrite do_wp_page >> > handle_pte_fault handle_mm_fault do_page_fault page_fault >> > >> > but I'm not seeing the large numbers of the ext4_page_mkwrite trace >> > that I get on 3.0.6. file_update_time is now by far the dominant >> > cause of latency. >> >> The culprit seems to be do_wp_page -> file_update_time -> >> mark_inode_dirty_sync. This surprises me for two reasons: >> >> - Why the _sync? Are we worried that data will be written out before >> the metadata? If so, surely there's a better way than adding latency >> here. > _sync just means that inode will become dirty for fsync(2) purposes but > not for fdatasync(2) purposes - i.e. it's just a timestamp update (or > it could be something similar). > >> - Why are we calling file_update_time at all? Presumably we also >> update the time when the page is written back (if not, that sounds >> like a bug, since the contents may be changed after something saw the >> mtime update), and, if so, why bother updating it on the first write? >> Anything that relies on this behavior is, I think, unreliable, because >> the page could be made writable arbitrarily early by another program >> that changes nothing. > We don't update timestamp when the page is written back. I believe this > is mostly because we don't know whether the data has been changed by a > write syscall, which already updated the timestamp, or by mmap. That is > also the reason why we update the timestamp at page fault time. > > The reason why file_update_time() blocks for you is probably that it > needs to get access to buffer where inode is stored on disk and because a > transaction including this buffer is committing at the moment, your thread > has to wait until the transaction commit finishes. This is mostly a problem > specific to how ext4 works so e.g. xfs shouldn't have it. > > Generally I believe the attempts to achieve any RT-like latencies when > writing to a filesystem are rather hopeless. How much hopeless depends on > the load of the filesystem (e.g., in your case of mostly idle filesystem I > can imagine some tweaks could reduce your latencies to an acceptable level > but once the disk gets loaded you'll be screwed). So I'd suggest that > having RT thread just store log in memory (or write to a pipe) and have > another non-RT thread write the data to disk would be a much more robust > design. Windows seems to do pretty well at this, and I think it should be fixable on Linux too. "All" that needs to be done is to remove the pte_wrprotect from page_mkclean_one. The fallout from that might be unpleasant, though, but it would probably speed up a number of workloads. Adding a whole separate process just to copy data from memory to disk sounds a bit like a hack -- that's what mmap + mlock would do if it worked better. Incidentally, pipes are no good. I haven't root-caused it yet, but both reading to and writing from pipes, even if O_NONBLOCK, can block. I haven't root-caused it yet. Anyway, I'll start sending patches to whittle away at the problem, starting right now :) --Andy -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href