ffd1f609ab
The max-pause limit helps to keep the sleep time inside balance_dirty_pages() within MAX_PAUSE=200ms. The 200ms max sleep means per task rate limit of 8pages/200ms=160KB/s when dirty exceeded, which normally is enough to stop dirtiers from continue pushing the dirty pages high, unless there are a sufficient large number of slow dirtiers (eg. 500 tasks doing 160KB/s will still sum up to 80MB/s, exceeding the write bandwidth of a slow disk and hence accumulating more and more dirty pages). The pass-good limit helps to let go of the good bdi's in the presence of a blocked bdi (ie. NFS server not responding) or slow USB disk which for some reason build up a large number of initial dirty pages that refuse to go away anytime soon. For example, given two bdi's A and B and the initial state bdi_thresh_A = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2 Then A get blocked, after a dozen seconds bdi_thresh_A = 0 bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2 bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2 The (bdi_dirty_B < bdi_thresh_B) test is now useless and the dirty pages will be effectively throttled by condition (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh). This has two problems: (1) we lose the protections for light dirtiers (2) balance_dirty_pages() effectively becomes IO-less because the (bdi_nr_reclaimable > bdi_thresh) test won't be true. This is good for IO, but balance_dirty_pages() loses an important way to break out of the loop which leads to more spread out throttle delays. DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA can eliminate the above issues. The only problem is, DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA needs to be defined as 2 to fully cover the above example while this patch uses the more conservative value 8 so as not to surprise people with too many dirty pages than expected. The max-pause limit won't noticeably impact the speed dirty pages are knocked down when there is a sudden drop of global/bdi dirty thresholds. Because the heavy dirties will be throttled below 160KB/s which is slow enough. It does help to avoid long dirty throttle delays and especially will make light dirtiers more responsive. Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> |
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.. | ||
backing-dev.c | ||
bootmem.c | ||
bounce.c | ||
cleancache.c | ||
compaction.c | ||
debug-pagealloc.c | ||
dmapool.c | ||
fadvise.c | ||
failslab.c | ||
filemap_xip.c | ||
filemap.c | ||
fremap.c | ||
highmem.c | ||
huge_memory.c | ||
hugetlb.c | ||
hwpoison-inject.c | ||
init-mm.c | ||
internal.h | ||
Kconfig | ||
Kconfig.debug | ||
kmemcheck.c | ||
kmemleak-test.c | ||
kmemleak.c | ||
ksm.c | ||
maccess.c | ||
madvise.c | ||
Makefile | ||
memblock.c | ||
memcontrol.c | ||
memory_hotplug.c | ||
memory-failure.c | ||
memory.c | ||
mempolicy.c | ||
mempool.c | ||
migrate.c | ||
mincore.c | ||
mlock.c | ||
mm_init.c | ||
mmap.c | ||
mmu_context.c | ||
mmu_notifier.c | ||
mmzone.c | ||
mprotect.c | ||
mremap.c | ||
msync.c | ||
nobootmem.c | ||
nommu.c | ||
oom_kill.c | ||
page_alloc.c | ||
page_cgroup.c | ||
page_io.c | ||
page_isolation.c | ||
page-writeback.c | ||
pagewalk.c | ||
percpu-km.c | ||
percpu-vm.c | ||
percpu.c | ||
pgtable-generic.c | ||
prio_tree.c | ||
quicklist.c | ||
readahead.c | ||
rmap.c | ||
shmem.c | ||
slab.c | ||
slob.c | ||
slub.c | ||
sparse-vmemmap.c | ||
sparse.c | ||
swap_state.c | ||
swap.c | ||
swapfile.c | ||
thrash.c | ||
truncate.c | ||
util.c | ||
vmalloc.c | ||
vmscan.c | ||
vmstat.c |