On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 02:28:39PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 01:17:22PM -0400, Brian Foster wrote: > > The iomap writeback infrastructure is currently able to construct > > extremely large bio chains (tens of GBs) associated with a single > > ioend. This consolidation provides no significant value as bio > > chains increase beyond a reasonable minimum size. On the other hand, > > this does hold significant numbers of pages in the writeback > > state across an unnecessarily large number of bios because the ioend > > is not processed for completion until the final bio in the chain > > completes. Cap an individual ioend to a reasonable size of 4096 > > pages (16MB with 4k pages) to avoid this condition. > > Note that once we get huge page/folio support in the page cache this > sucks as we can trivially handle much larger sizes with very little > iteration. > > I wonder if both this limit and the previous one should be based on the > number of pages added instead. And in fact maybe if we only want the > limit at add to ioend time and skip the defer to workqueue part entirely. > Both limits are already based on pages. I imagine they could change to folios when appropriate. The defer to workqueue part was based on your suggestion[1]. The primary purpose of this series is to address the completion processing soft lockup warning, so I don't have a strong preference on whether we do that by capping ioend size, processing (and yielding) from non-atomic context, or both. Brian [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20200917080455.GY26262@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/