Commits
Jens Axboe committed aac8d41cd43
writeback: only allow one inflight and pending full flush When someone calls wakeup_flusher_threads() or wakeup_flusher_threads_bdi(), they schedule writeback of all dirty pages in the system (or on that bdi). If we are tight on memory, we can get tons of these queued from kswapd/vmscan. This causes (at least) two problems: 1) We consume a ton of memory just allocating writeback work items. We've seen as much as 600 million of these writeback work items pending. That's a lot of memory to pointlessly hold hostage, while the box is under memory pressure. 2) We spend so much time processing these work items, that we introduce a softlockup in writeback processing. This is because each of the writeback work items don't end up doing any work (it's hard when you have millions of identical ones coming in to the flush machinery), so we just sit in a tight loop pulling work items and deleting/freeing them. Fix this by adding a 'start_all' bit to the writeback structure, and set that when someone attempts to flush all dirty pages. The bit is cleared when we start writeback on that work item. If the bit is already set when we attempt to queue !nr_pages writeback, then we simply ignore it. This provides us one full flush in flight, with one pending as well, and makes for more efficient handling of this type of writeback. Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Tested-by: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>