On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 4:36 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu 30-03-17 15:48:42, Ilya Dryomov wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 1:21 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > [...] >> > familiar with Ceph at all but does any of its (slab) shrinkers generate >> > IO to recurse back? >> >> We don't register any custom shrinkers. This is XFS on top of rbd, >> a ceph-backed block device. > > OK, that was the part I was missing. So you depend on the XFS to make a > forward progress here. > >> >> Well, >> >> it's got to go through the same ceph_connection: >> >> >> >> rbd_queue_workfn >> >> ceph_osdc_start_request >> >> ceph_con_send >> >> mutex_lock(&con->mutex) # deadlock, OSD X worker is knocked out >> >> >> >> Now if that was a GFP_NOIO allocation, we would simply block in the >> >> allocator. The placement algorithm distributes objects across the OSDs >> >> in a pseudo-random fashion, so even if we had a whole bunch of I/Os for >> >> that OSD, some other I/Os for other OSDs would complete in the meantime >> >> and free up memory. If we are under the kind of memory pressure that >> >> makes GFP_NOIO allocations block for an extended period of time, we are >> >> bound to have a lot of pre-open sockets, as we would have done at least >> >> some flushing by then. >> > >> > How is this any different from xfs waiting for its IO to be done? >> >> I feel like we are talking past each other here. If the worker in >> question isn't deadlocked, it will eventually get its socket and start >> flushing I/O. If it has deadlocked, it won't... > > But if the allocation is stuck then the holder of the lock cannot make > a forward progress and it is effectivelly deadlocked because other IO > depends on the lock it holds. Maybe I just ask bad questions but what Only I/O to the same OSD. A typical ceph cluster has dozens of OSDs, so there is plenty of room for other in-flight I/Os to finish and move the allocator forward. The lock in question is per-ceph_connection (read: per-OSD). > makes GFP_NOIO different from GFP_KERNEL here. We know that the later > might need to wait for an IO to finish in the shrinker but it itself > doesn't get the lock in question directly. The former depends on the > allocator forward progress as well and that in turn wait for somebody > else to proceed with the IO. So to me any blocking allocation while > holding a lock which blocks further IO to complete is simply broken. Right, with GFP_NOIO we simply wait -- there is nothing wrong with a blocking allocation, at least in the general case. With GFP_KERNEL we deadlock, either in rbd/libceph (less likely) or in the filesystem above (more likely, shown in the xfs_reclaim_inodes_ag() traces you omitted in your quote). Thanks, Ilya -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-xfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html