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loop: Add PF_LESS_THROTTLE to block/loop device thread. 

When a filesystem is mounted from a loop device, writes are
throttled by balance_dirty_pages() twice: once when writing
to the filesystem and once when the loop_handle_cmd() writes
to the backing file.  This double-throttling can trigger
positive feedback loops that create significant delays.  The
throttling at the lower level is seen by the upper level as
a slow device, so it throttles extra hard.

The PF_LESS_THROTTLE flag was created to handle exactly this
circumstance, though with an NFS filesystem mounted from a
local NFS server.  It reduces the throttling on the lower
layer so that it can proceed largely unthrottled.

To demonstrate this, create a filesystem on a loop device
and write (e.g. with dd) several large files which combine
to consume significantly more than the limit set by
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio or dirty_bytes.  Measure the total
time taken.

When I do this directly on a device (no loop device) the
total time for several runs (mkfs, mount, write 200 files,
umount) is fairly stable: 28-35 seconds.
When I do this over a loop device the times are much worse
and less stable.  52-460 seconds.  Half below 100seconds,
half above.
When I apply this patch, the times become stable again,
though not as fast as the no-loop-back case: 53-72 seconds.

There may be room for further improvement as the total overhead still
seems too high, but this is a big improvement.

Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Ming Lei <tom.leiming@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
hifive-unleashed-5.1
NeilBrown 2017-06-16 15:02:09 +10:00 committed by Jens Axboe
parent c27b2d634f
commit b2ee7d46be
1 changed files with 7 additions and 1 deletions
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8
drivers/block/loop.c
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@ -854,10 +854,16 @@ static void loop_unprepare_queue(struct loop_device *lo)
kthread_stop(lo->worker_task);
}
static int loop_kthread_worker_fn(void *worker_ptr)
{
current->flags |= PF_LESS_THROTTLE;
return kthread_worker_fn(worker_ptr);
}
static int loop_prepare_queue(struct loop_device *lo)
{
kthread_init_worker(&lo->worker);
lo->worker_task = kthread_run(kthread_worker_fn,
lo->worker_task = kthread_run(loop_kthread_worker_fn,
&lo->worker, "loop%d", lo->lo_number);
if (IS_ERR(lo->worker_task))
return -ENOMEM;