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path: root/include/trace/events/writeback.h
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2011-12-18writeback: show writeback reason with __print_symbolicWu Fengguang
This makes the binary trace understandable by trace-cmd. CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> CC: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com> CC: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31writeback: Add a 'reason' to wb_writeback_workCurt Wohlgemuth
This creates a new 'reason' field in a wb_writeback_work structure, which unambiguously identifies who initiates writeback activity. A 'wb_reason' enumeration has been added to writeback.h, to enumerate the possible reasons. The 'writeback_work_class' and tracepoint event class and 'writeback_queue_io' tracepoints are updated to include the symbolic 'reason' in all trace events. And the 'writeback_inodes_sbXXX' family of routines has had a wb_stats parameter added to them, so callers can specify why writeback is being started. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31writeback: send work item to queue_io, move_expired_inodesCurt Wohlgemuth
Instead of sending ->older_than_this to queue_io() and move_expired_inodes(), send the entire wb_writeback_work structure. There are other fields of a work item that are useful in these routines and in tracepoints. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Curt Wohlgemuth <curtw@google.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pagesWu Fengguang
Useful for analyzing the dynamics of the throttling algorithms and debugging user reported problems. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-31writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimitWu Fengguang
It helps understand how various throttle bandwidths are updated. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-10-03writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages()Wu Fengguang
As proposed by Chris, Dave and Jan, don't start foreground writeback IO inside balance_dirty_pages(). Instead, simply let it idle sleep for some time to throttle the dirtying task. In the mean while, kick off the per-bdi flusher thread to do background writeback IO. RATIONALS ========= - disk seeks on concurrent writeback of multiple inodes (Dave Chinner) If every thread doing writes and being throttled start foreground writeback, it leads to N IO submitters from at least N different inodes at the same time, end up with N different sets of IO being issued with potentially zero locality to each other, resulting in much lower elevator sort/merge efficiency and hence we seek the disk all over the place to service the different sets of IO. OTOH, if there is only one submission thread, it doesn't jump between inodes in the same way when congestion clears - it keeps writing to the same inode, resulting in large related chunks of sequential IOs being issued to the disk. This is more efficient than the above foreground writeback because the elevator works better and the disk seeks less. - lock contention and cache bouncing on concurrent IO submitters (Dave Chinner) With this patchset, the fs_mark benchmark on a 12-drive software RAID0 goes from CPU bound to IO bound, freeing "3-4 CPUs worth of spinlock contention". * "CPU usage has dropped by ~55%", "it certainly appears that most of the CPU time saving comes from the removal of contention on the inode_wb_list_lock" (IMHO at least 10% comes from the reduction of cacheline bouncing, because the new code is able to call much less frequently into balance_dirty_pages() and hence access the global page states) * the user space "App overhead" is reduced by 20%, by avoiding the cacheline pollution by the complex writeback code path * "for a ~5% throughput reduction", "the number of write IOs have dropped by ~25%", and the elapsed time reduced from 41:42.17 to 40:53.23. * On a simple test of 100 dd, it reduces the CPU %system time from 30% to 3%, and improves IO throughput from 38MB/s to 42MB/s. - IO size too small for fast arrays and too large for slow USB sticks The write_chunk used by current balance_dirty_pages() cannot be directly set to some large value (eg. 128MB) for better IO efficiency. Because it could lead to more than 1 second user perceivable stalls. Even the current 4MB write size may be too large for slow USB sticks. The fact that balance_dirty_pages() starts IO on itself couples the IO size to wait time, which makes it hard to do suitable IO size while keeping the wait time under control. Now it's possible to increase writeback chunk size proportional to the disk bandwidth. In a simple test of 50 dd's on XFS, 1-HDD, 3GB ram, the larger writeback size dramatically reduces the seek count to 1/10 (far beyond my expectation) and improves the write throughput by 24%. - long block time in balance_dirty_pages() hurts desktop responsiveness Many of us may have the experience: it often takes a couple of seconds or even long time to stop a heavy writing dd/cp/tar command with Ctrl-C or "kill -9". - IO pipeline broken by bumpy write() progress There are a broad class of "loop {read(buf); write(buf);}" applications whose read() pipeline will be under-utilized or even come to a stop if the write()s have long latencies _or_ don't progress in a constant rate. The current threshold based throttling inherently transfers the large low level IO completion fluctuations to bumpy application write()s, and further deteriorates with increasing number of dirtiers and/or bdi's. For example, when doing 50 dd's + 1 remote rsync to an XFS partition, the rsync progresses very bumpy in legacy kernel, and throughput is improved by 67% by this patchset. (plus the larger write chunk size, it will be 93% speedup). The new rate based throttling can support 1000+ dd's with excellent smoothness, low latency and low overheads. For the above reasons, it's much better to do IO-less and low latency pauses in balance_dirty_pages(). Jan Kara, Dave Chinner and me explored the scheme to let balance_dirty_pages() wait for enough writeback IO completions to safeguard the dirty limit. However it's found to have two problems: - in large NUMA systems, the per-cpu counters may have big accounting errors, leading to big throttle wait time and jitters. - NFS may kill large amount of unstable pages with one single COMMIT. Because NFS server serves COMMIT with expensive fsync() IOs, it is desirable to delay and reduce the number of COMMITs. So it's not likely to optimize away such kind of bursty IO completions, and the resulted large (and tiny) stall times in IO completion based throttling. So here is a pause time oriented approach, which tries to control the pause time in each balance_dirty_pages() invocations, by controlling the number of pages dirtied before calling balance_dirty_pages(), for smooth and efficient dirty throttling: - avoid useless (eg. zero pause time) balance_dirty_pages() calls - avoid too small pause time (less than 4ms, which burns CPU power) - avoid too large pause time (more than 200ms, which hurts responsiveness) - avoid big fluctuations of pause times It can control pause times at will. The default policy (in a followup patch) will be to do ~10ms pauses in 1-dd case, and increase to ~100ms in 1000-dd case. BEHAVIOR CHANGE =============== (1) dirty threshold Users will notice that the applications will get throttled once crossing the global (background + dirty)/2=15% threshold, and then balanced around 17.5%. Before patch, the behavior is to just throttle it at 20% dirtyable memory in 1-dd case. Since the task will be soft throttled earlier than before, it may be perceived by end users as performance "slow down" if his application happens to dirty more than 15% dirtyable memory. (2) smoothness/responsiveness Users will notice a more responsive system during heavy writeback. "killall dd" will take effect instantly. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-08-31writeback: show raw dirtied_when in trace writeback_single_inodeWu Fengguang
Save inode->dirtied_when in the raw trace output for reliable scripting, and to also show in formatted output the relative age in seconds for easy human reading. CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09writeback: trace global_dirty_stateWu Fengguang
Add trace event balance_dirty_state for showing the global dirty page counts and thresholds at each global_dirty_limits() invocation. This will cover the callers throttle_vm_writeout(), over_bground_thresh() and each balance_dirty_pages() loop. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-07-09writeback: make writeback_control.nr_to_write straightWu Fengguang
Pass struct wb_writeback_work all the way down to writeback_sb_inodes(), and initialize the struct writeback_control there. struct writeback_control is basically designed to control writeback of a single file, but we keep abuse it for writing multiple files in writeback_sb_inodes() and its callers. It immediately clean things up, e.g. suddenly wbc.nr_to_write vs work->nr_pages starts to make sense, and instead of saving and restoring pages_skipped in writeback_sb_inodes it can always start with a clean zero value. It also makes a neat IO pattern change: large dirty files are now written in the full 4MB writeback chunk size, rather than whatever remained quota in wbc->nr_to_write. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Proposed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08writeback: trace event writeback_queue_ioWu Fengguang
Note that it adds a little overheads to account the moved/enqueued inodes from b_dirty to b_io. The "moved" accounting may be later used to limit the number of inodes that can be moved in one shot, in order to keep spinlock hold time under control. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08writeback: trace event writeback_single_inodeWu Fengguang
It is valuable to know how the dirty inodes are iterated and their IO size. "writeback_single_inode: bdi 8:0: ino=134246746 state=I_DIRTY_SYNC|I_SYNC age=414 index=0 to_write=1024 wrote=0" - "state" reflects inode->i_state at the end of writeback_single_inode() - "index" reflects mapping->writeback_index after the ->writepages() call - "to_write" is the wbc->nr_to_write at entrance of writeback_single_inode() - "wrote" is the number of pages actually written v2: add trace event writeback_single_inode_requeue as proposed by Dave. CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-06-08writeback: remove writeback_control.more_ioWu Fengguang
When wbc.more_io was first introduced, it indicates whether there are at least one superblock whose s_more_io contains more IO work. Now with the per-bdi writeback, it can be replaced with a simple b_more_io test. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
2011-01-13writeback: trace wakeup event for background writebackWu Fengguang
This tracks when balance_dirty_pages() tries to wakeup the flusher thread for background writeback (if it was not started already). Suggested-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-10-26writeback: do not sleep on the congestion queue if there are no congested ↵Mel Gorman
BDIs or if significant congestion is not being encountered in the current zone If congestion_wait() is called with no BDI congested, the caller will sleep for the full timeout and this may be an unnecessary sleep. This patch adds a wait_iff_congested() that checks congestion and only sleeps if a BDI is congested else, it calls cond_resched() to ensure the caller is not hogging the CPU longer than its quota but otherwise will not sleep. This is aimed at reducing some of the major desktop stalls reported during IO. For example, while kswapd is operating, it calls congestion_wait() but it could just have been reclaiming clean page cache pages with no congestion. Without this patch, it would sleep for a full timeout but after this patch, it'll just call schedule() if it has been on the CPU too long. Similar logic applies to direct reclaimers that are not making enough progress. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-10-26writeback: account for time spent congestion_waitedMel Gorman
There is strong evidence to indicate a lot of time is being spent in congestion_wait(), some of it unnecessarily. This patch adds a tracepoint for congestion_wait to record when congestion_wait() was called, how long the timeout was for and how long it actually slept. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-10-26writeback: remove nonblocking/encountered_congestion referencesWu Fengguang
This removes more dead code that was somehow missed by commit 0d99519efef (writeback: remove unused nonblocking and congestion checks). There are no behavior change except for the removal of two entries from one of the ext4 tracing interface. The nonblocking checks in ->writepages are no longer used because the flusher now prefer to block on get_request_wait() than to skip inodes on IO congestion. The latter will lead to more seeky IO. The nonblocking checks in ->writepage are no longer used because it's redundant with the WB_SYNC_NONE check. We no long set ->nonblocking in VM page out and page migration, because a) it's effectively redundant with WB_SYNC_NONE in current code b) it's old semantic of "Don't get stuck on request queues" is mis-behavior: that would skip some dirty inodes on congestion and page out others, which is unfair in terms of LRU age. Inspired by Christoph Hellwig. Thanks! Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Cc: Sage Weil <sage@newdream.net> Cc: Steve French <sfrench@samba.org> Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-08-07writeback: add new tracepointsArtem Bityutskiy
Add 2 new trace points to the periodic write-back wake up case, just like we do in the 'bdi_queue_work()' function. Namely, introduce: 1. trace_writeback_wake_thread(bdi) 2. trace_writeback_wake_forker_thread(bdi) The first event is triggered every time we wake up a bdi thread to start periodic background write-out. The second event is triggered only when the bdi thread does not exist and should be created by the forker thread. This patch was suggested by Dave Chinner and Christoph Hellwig. Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-08-07writeback.h: needs linux/device.hRandy Dunlap
include/trace/events/writeback.h uses dev_name(), so it needs to include linux/device.h. include/trace/events/writeback.h:12: error: implicit declaration of function 'dev_name' Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-08-07writeback: Add tracing to write_cache_pagesDave Chinner
Add a trace event to the ->writepage loop in write_cache_pages to give visibility into how the ->writepage call is changing variables within the writeback control structure. Of most interest is how wbc->nr_to_write changes from call to call, especially with filesystems that write multiple pages in ->writepage. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-08-07writeback: Add tracing to balance_dirty_pagesDave Chinner
Tracing high level background writeback events is good, but it doesn't give the entire picture. Add visibility into write throttling to catch IO dispatched by foreground throttling of processing dirtying lots of pages. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2010-08-07writeback: Initial tracing supportDave Chinner
Trace queue/sched/exec parts of the writeback loop. This provides insight into when and why flusher threads are scheduled to run. e.g a sync invocation leaves traces like: sync-[...]: writeback_queue: bdi 8:0: sb_dev 8:1 nr_pages=7712 sync_mode=0 kupdate=0 range_cyclic=0 background=0 flush-8:0-[...]: writeback_exec: bdi 8:0: sb_dev 8:1 nr_pages=7712 sync_mode=0 kupdate=0 range_cyclic=0 background=0 This also lays the foundation for adding more writeback tracing to provide deeper insight into the whole writeback path. The original tracing code is from Jens Axboe, though this version is a rewrite as a result of the code being traced changing significantly. Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>