[patch 028/127] mm, vmscan: get rid of throttle_vm_writeout

[patch 028/127] mm, vmscan: get rid of throttle_vm_writeout

[akpm]

From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Subject: mm, vmscan: get rid of throttle_vm_writeout

throttle_vm_writeout() was introduced back in 2005 to fix OOMs caused by
excessive pageout activity during the reclaim.  Too many pages could be
put under writeback therefore LRUs would be full of unreclaimable pages
until the IO completes and in turn the OOM killer could be invoked.

There have been some important changes introduced since then in the
reclaim path though.  Writers are throttled by balance_dirty_pages when
initiating the buffered IO and later during the memory pressure, the
direct reclaim is throttled by wait_iff_congested if the node is
considered congested by dirty pages on LRUs and the underlying bdi is
congested by the queued IO.  The kswapd is throttled as well if it
encounters pages marked for immediate reclaim or under writeback which
signals that that there are too many pages under writeback already. 
Finally should_reclaim_retry does congestion_wait if the reclaim cannot
make any progress and there are too many dirty/writeback pages.

Another important aspect is that we do not issue any IO from the direct
reclaim context anymore.  In a heavy parallel load this could queue a lot
of IO which would be very scattered and thus unefficient which would just
make the problem worse.

This three mechanisms should throttle and keep the amount of IO in a
steady state even under heavy IO and memory pressure so yet another
throttling point doesn't really seem helpful.  Quite contrary, Mikulas
Patocka has reported that swap backed by dm-crypt doesn't work properly
because the swapout IO cannot make sufficient progress as the writeout
path depends on dm_crypt worker which has to allocate memory to perform
the encryption.  In order to guarantee a forward progress it relies on the
mempool allocator.  mempool_alloc(), however, prefers to use the
underlying (usually page) allocator before it grabs objects from the pool.
Such an allocation can dive into the memory reclaim and consequently to
throttle_vm_writeout.  If there are too many dirty or pages under
writeback it will get throttled even though it is in fact a flusher to
clear pending pages.

[  345.352536] kworker/u4:0    D ffff88003df7f438 10488     6      2	0x00000000
[  345.352536] Workqueue: kcryptd kcryptd_crypt [dm_crypt]
[  345.352536]  ffff88003df7f438 ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003e5d8e80
[  345.352536]  ffff88003dfb3240 ffff88003df73240 ffff88003df80000 ffff88003df7f470
[  345.352536]  ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003e5d0380 ffff88003df7f828 ffff88003df7f450
[  345.352536] Call Trace:
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff818d466c>] schedule+0x3c/0x90
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff818d96a8>] schedule_timeout+0x1d8/0x360
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81135e40>] ? detach_if_pending+0x1c0/0x1c0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811407c3>] ? ktime_get+0xb3/0x150
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811958cf>] ? __delayacct_blkio_start+0x1f/0x30
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff818d39e4>] io_schedule_timeout+0xa4/0x110
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff8121d886>] congestion_wait+0x86/0x1f0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff810fdf40>] ? prepare_to_wait_event+0xf0/0xf0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff812061d4>] throttle_vm_writeout+0x44/0xd0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81211533>] shrink_zone_memcg+0x613/0x720
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81211720>] shrink_zone+0xe0/0x300
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81211aed>] do_try_to_free_pages+0x1ad/0x450
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81211e7f>] try_to_free_pages+0xef/0x300
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811fef19>] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x879/0x1210
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff810e8080>] ? sched_clock_cpu+0x90/0xc0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff8125a8d1>] alloc_pages_current+0xa1/0x1f0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81265ef5>] ? new_slab+0x3f5/0x6a0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81265dd7>] new_slab+0x2d7/0x6a0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff810e7f87>] ? sched_clock_local+0x17/0x80
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff812678cb>] ___slab_alloc+0x3fb/0x5c0
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811f71bd>] ? mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff810e7f87>] ? sched_clock_local+0x17/0x80
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811f71bd>] ? mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81267ae1>] __slab_alloc+0x51/0x90
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811f71bd>] ? mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff81267d9b>] kmem_cache_alloc+0x27b/0x310
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811f71bd>] mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff811f6f11>] mempool_alloc+0x91/0x230
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffff8141a02d>] bio_alloc_bioset+0xbd/0x260
[  345.352536]  [<ffffffffc02f1a54>] kcryptd_crypt+0x114/0x3b0 [dm_crypt]

Let's just drop throttle_vm_writeout altogether. It is not very much
helpful anymore.

I have tried to test a potential writeback IO runaway similar to the one
described in the original patch which has introduced that [1].  Small
virtual machine (512MB RAM, 4 CPUs, 2G of swap space and disk image on a
rather slow NFS in a sync mode on the host) with 8 parallel writers each
writing 1G worth of data.  As soon as the pagecache fills up and the
direct reclaim hits then I start anon memory consumer in a loop
(allocating 300M and exiting after populating it) in the background to
make the memory pressure even stronger as well as to disrupt the steady
state for the IO.  The direct reclaim is throttled because of the
congestion as well as kswapd hitting congestion_wait due to nr_immediate
but throttle_vm_writeout doesn't ever trigger the sleep throughout the
test.  Dirty+writeback are close to nr_dirty_threshold with some
fluctuations caused by the anon consumer.

[1] https://www2.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.9-rc1/2.6.9-rc1-mm3/broken-out/vm-pageout-throttling.patch
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1471171473-21418-1-git-send-email-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com>
Cc: Ondrej Kozina <okozina@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
---

 include/linux/writeback.h |    1 -
 mm/page-writeback.c       |   30 ------------------------------
 mm/vmscan.c               |    2 --
 3 files changed, 33 deletions(-)

diff -puN include/linux/writeback.h~mm-vmscan-get-rid-of-throttle_vm_writeout include/linux/writeback.h
--- a/include/linux/writeback.h~mm-vmscan-get-rid-of-throttle_vm_writeout
+++ a/include/linux/writeback.h
@@ -319,7 +319,6 @@ void laptop_mode_timer_fn(unsigned long
 #else
 static inline void laptop_sync_completion(void) { }
 #endif
-void throttle_vm_writeout(gfp_t gfp_mask);
 bool node_dirty_ok(struct pglist_data *pgdat);
 int wb_domain_init(struct wb_domain *dom, gfp_t gfp);
 #ifdef CONFIG_CGROUP_WRITEBACK
diff -puN mm/page-writeback.c~mm-vmscan-get-rid-of-throttle_vm_writeout mm/page-writeback.c
--- a/mm/page-writeback.c~mm-vmscan-get-rid-of-throttle_vm_writeout
+++ a/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -1965,36 +1965,6 @@ bool wb_over_bg_thresh(struct bdi_writeb
 	return false;
 }
 
-void throttle_vm_writeout(gfp_t gfp_mask)
-{
-	unsigned long background_thresh;
-	unsigned long dirty_thresh;
-
-        for ( ; ; ) {
-		global_dirty_limits(&background_thresh, &dirty_thresh);
-		dirty_thresh = hard_dirty_limit(&global_wb_domain, dirty_thresh);
-
-                /*
-                 * Boost the allowable dirty threshold a bit for page
-                 * allocators so they don't get DoS'ed by heavy writers
-                 */
-                dirty_thresh += dirty_thresh / 10;      /* wheeee... */
-
-                if (global_node_page_state(NR_UNSTABLE_NFS) +
-			global_node_page_state(NR_WRITEBACK) <= dirty_thresh)
-                        	break;
-                congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
-
-		/*
-		 * The caller might hold locks which can prevent IO completion
-		 * or progress in the filesystem.  So we cannot just sit here
-		 * waiting for IO to complete.
-		 */
-		if ((gfp_mask & (__GFP_FS|__GFP_IO)) != (__GFP_FS|__GFP_IO))
-			break;
-        }
-}
-
 /*
  * sysctl handler for /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
  */
diff -puN mm/vmscan.c~mm-vmscan-get-rid-of-throttle_vm_writeout mm/vmscan.c
--- a/mm/vmscan.c~mm-vmscan-get-rid-of-throttle_vm_writeout
+++ a/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2418,8 +2418,6 @@ static void shrink_node_memcg(struct pgl
 	if (inactive_list_is_low(lruvec, false, sc))
 		shrink_active_list(SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX, lruvec,
 				   sc, LRU_ACTIVE_ANON);