sync: don't block the flusher thread waiting on IO

When sync does it's WB_SYNC_ALL writeback, it issues data Io and
then immediately waits for IO completion. This is done in the
context of the flusher thread, and hence completely ties up the
flusher thread for the backing device until all the dirty inodes
have been synced. On filesystems that are dirtying inodes constantly
and quickly, this means the flusher thread can be tied up for
minutes per sync call and hence badly affect system level write IO
performance as the page cache cannot be cleaned quickly.

We already have a wait loop for IO completion for sync(2), so cut
this out of the flusher thread and delegate it to wait_sb_inodes().
Hence we can do rapid IO submission, and then wait for it all to
complete.

Effect of sync on fsmark before the patch:

FSUse%        Count         Size    Files/sec     App Overhead
.....
     0       640000         4096      35154.6          1026984
     0       720000         4096      36740.3          1023844
     0       800000         4096      36184.6           916599
     0       880000         4096       1282.7          1054367
     0       960000         4096       3951.3           918773
     0      1040000         4096      40646.2           996448
     0      1120000         4096      43610.1           895647
     0      1200000         4096      40333.1           921048

And a single sync pass took:

  real    0m52.407s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.090s

After the patch, there is no impact on fsmark results, and each
individual sync(2) operation run concurrently with the same fsmark
workload takes roughly 7s:

  real    0m6.930s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.039s

IOWs, sync is 7-8x faster on a busy filesystem and does not have an
adverse impact on ongoing async data write operations.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Dan Trifan <jimsth@gmail.com>
writeback: fix writeback cache thrashing

From: Namjae Jeon <namjae.jeon@samsung.com>

Consider Process A: huge I/O on sda
        doing heavy write operation - dirty memory becomes more
        than dirty_background_ratio
        on HDD - flusher thread flush-8:0

Consider Process B: small I/O on sdb
        doing while [1]; read 1024K + rewrite 1024K + sleep 2sec
        on Flash device - flusher thread flush-8:16

As Process A is a heavy dirtier, dirty memory becomes more
than dirty_background_thresh. Due to this, below check becomes
true(checking global_page_state in over_bground_thresh)
for all bdi devices(even for very small dirtied bdi - sdb):

In this case, even small cached data on 'sdb' is forced to flush
and writeback cache thrashing happens.

When we added debug prints inside above 'if' condition and ran
above Process A(heavy dirtier on bdi with flush-8:0) and
Process B(1024K frequent read/rewrite on bdi with flush-8:16)
we got below prints:

[Test setup: ARM dual core CPU, 512 MB RAM]

[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  56064 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  56704 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 84720 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 94720 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   384 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   960 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =    64 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 92160 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   256 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   768 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =    64 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   256 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   320 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =     0 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 92032 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 91968 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   192 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  1024 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =    64 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   192 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   576 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =     0 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 84352 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   192 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =   512 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:16 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =     0 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 92608 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE = 92544 KB

As mentioned in above log, when global dirty memory > global background_thresh
small cached data is also forced to flush by flush-8:16.
If removing global background_thresh checking code, we can reduce cache
thrashing of frequently used small data.
And It will be great if we can reserve a portion of writeback cache using
min_ratio.

After applying patch:
$ echo 5 > /sys/block/sdb/bdi/min_ratio
$ cat /sys/block/sdb/bdi/min_ratio
5
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  56064 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  56704 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  84160 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  96960 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  94080 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  93120 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  93120 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  91520 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  89600 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  93696 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  93696 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  72960 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  90624 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  90624 KB
[over_bground_thresh]: wakeup flush-8:0 : BDI_RECLAIMABLE =  90688 KB

As mentioned in the above logs, once cache is reserved for Process B,
and patch is applied there is less writeback cache thrashing on sdb
by frequent forced writeback by flush-8:16 in over_bground_thresh.

After all, small cached data will be flushed by periodic writeback
once every dirty_writeback_interval.

Suggested-by: Wanpeng Li <liwanp@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Namjae Jeon <namjae.jeon@samsung.com>
Signed-off-by: Vivek Trivedi <t.vivek@samsung.com>
Signed-off-by: Francisco Franco <franciscofranco.1990@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Trifan <jimsth@gmail.com>
writeback: Fix occasional slow sync(1)

In case when system contains no dirty pages, wakeup_flusher_threads()
will submit WB_SYNC_NONE writeback for 0 pages so wb_writeback() exits
immediately without doing anything. Thus sync(1) will write all the
dirty inodes from a WB_SYNC_ALL writeback pass which is slow.

Fix the problem by using get_nr_dirty_pages() in
wakeup_flusher_threads() instead of calculating number of dirty pages
manually. That function also takes number of dirty inodes into account.

CC: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reported-by: Paul Taysom <taysom@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Cristoforo Cataldo <cristoforo.cataldo@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Francisco Franco <franciscofranco.1990@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Trifan <jimsth@gmail.com>
mm:page-writeback: increase bdi_min_ratio to 5

Signed-off-by: Dan Trifan <jimsth@gmail.com>