• Wu Fengguang's avatar
    writeback: skip balance_dirty_pages() for in-memory fs · 3efaf0fa
    Wu Fengguang authored
    This avoids unnecessary checks and dirty throttling on tmpfs/ramfs.
    
    Notes about the tmpfs/ramfs behavior changes:
    
    As for 2.6.36 and older kernels, the tmpfs writes will sleep inside
    balance_dirty_pages() as long as we are over the (dirty+background)/2
    global throttle threshold.  This is because both the dirty pages and
    threshold will be 0 for tmpfs/ramfs. Hence this test will always
    evaluate to TRUE:
    
                    dirty_exceeded =
                            (bdi_nr_reclaimable + bdi_nr_writeback >= bdi_thresh)
                            || (nr_reclaimable + nr_writeback >= dirty_thresh);
    
    For 2.6.37, someone complained that the current logic does not allow the
    users to set vm.dirty_ratio=0.  So commit 4cbec4c8 changed the test to
    
                    dirty_exceeded =
                            (bdi_nr_reclaimable + bdi_nr_writeback > bdi_thresh)
                            || (nr_reclaimable + nr_writeback > dirty_thresh);
    
    So 2.6.37 will behave differently for tmpfs/ramfs: it will never get
    throttled unless the global dirty threshold is exceeded (which is very
    unlikely to happen; once happen, will block many tasks).
    
    I'd say that the 2.6.36 behavior is very bad for tmpfs/ramfs. It means
    for a busy writing server, tmpfs write()s may get livelocked! The
    "inadvertent" throttling can hardly bring help to any workload because
    of its "either no throttling, or get throttled to death" property.
    
    So based on 2.6.37, this patch won't bring more noticeable changes.
    
    CC: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarRik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarMinchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
    3efaf0fa
page-writeback.c 40 KB