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.

  kworker/u4:0    D ffff88003df7f438 10488     6      2	0x00000000
  Workqueue: kcryptd kcryptd_crypt [dm_crypt]
  Call Trace:
    schedule+0x3c/0x90
    schedule_timeout+0x1d8/0x360
    io_schedule_timeout+0xa4/0x110
    congestion_wait+0x86/0x1f0
    throttle_vm_writeout+0x44/0xd0
    shrink_zone_memcg+0x613/0x720
    shrink_zone+0xe0/0x300
    do_try_to_free_pages+0x1ad/0x450
    try_to_free_pages+0xef/0x300
    __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x879/0x1210
    alloc_pages_current+0xa1/0x1f0
    new_slab+0x2d7/0x6a0
    ___slab_alloc+0x3fb/0x5c0
    __slab_alloc+0x51/0x90
    kmem_cache_alloc+0x27b/0x310
    mempool_alloc_slab+0x1d/0x30
    mempool_alloc+0x91/0x230
    bio_alloc_bioset+0xbd/0x260
    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.orgSigned-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>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>