mm: vmscan: do not writeback filesystem pages in direct reclaim

Testing from the XFS folk revealed that there is still too much I/O from
the end of the LRU in kswapd.  Previously it was considered acceptable by
VM people for a small number of pages to be written back from reclaim with
testing generally showing about 0.3% of pages reclaimed were written back
(higher if memory was low).  That writing back a small number of pages is
ok has been heavily disputed for quite some time and Dave Chinner
explained it well;

	It doesn't have to be a very high number to be a problem. IO
	is orders of magnitude slower than the CPU time it takes to
	flush a page, so the cost of making a bad flush decision is
	very high. And single page writeback from the LRU is almost
	always a bad flush decision.

To complicate matters, filesystems respond very differently to requests
from reclaim according to Christoph Hellwig;

	xfs tries to write it back if the requester is kswapd
	ext4 ignores the request if it's a delayed allocation
	btrfs ignores the request

As a result, each filesystem has different performance characteristics
when under memory pressure and there are many pages being dirtied.  In
some cases, the request is ignored entirely so the VM cannot depend on the
IO being dispatched.

The objective of this series is to reduce writing of filesystem-backed
pages from reclaim, play nicely with writeback that is already in progress
and throttle reclaim appropriately when writeback pages are encountered.
The assumption is that the flushers will always write pages faster than if
reclaim issues the IO.

A secondary goal is to avoid the problem whereby direct reclaim splices
two potentially deep call stacks together.

There is a potential new problem as reclaim has less control over how long
before a page in a particularly zone or container is cleaned and direct
reclaimers depend on kswapd or flusher threads to do the necessary work.
However, as filesystems sometimes ignore direct reclaim requests already,
it is not expected to be a serious issue.

Patch 1 disables writeback of filesystem pages from direct reclaim
	entirely. Anonymous pages are still written.

Patch 2 removes dead code in lumpy reclaim as it is no longer able
	to synchronously write pages. This hurts lumpy reclaim but
	there is an expectation that compaction is used for hugepage
	allocations these days and lumpy reclaim's days are numbered.

Patches 3-4 add warnings to XFS and ext4 if called from
	direct reclaim. With patch 1, this "never happens" and is
	intended to catch regressions in this logic in the future.

Patch 5 disables writeback of filesystem pages from kswapd unless
	the priority is raised to the point where kswapd is considered
	to be in trouble.

Patch 6 throttles reclaimers if too many dirty pages are being
	encountered and the zones or backing devices are congested.

Patch 7 invalidates dirty pages found at the end of the LRU so they
	are reclaimed quickly after being written back rather than
	waiting for a reclaimer to find them

I consider this series to be orthogonal to the writeback work but it is
worth noting that the writeback work affects the viability of patch 8 in
particular.

I tested this on ext4 and xfs using fs_mark, a simple writeback test based
on dd and a micro benchmark that does a streaming write to a large mapping
(exercises use-once LRU logic) followed by streaming writes to a mix of
anonymous and file-backed mappings.  The command line for fs_mark when
botted with 512M looked something like

./fs_mark -d  /tmp/fsmark-2676  -D  100  -N  150  -n  150  -L  25  -t  1  -S0  -s  10485760

The number of files was adjusted depending on the amount of available
memory so that the files created was about 3xRAM.  For multiple threads,
the -d switch is specified multiple times.

The test machine is x86-64 with an older generation of AMD processor with
4 cores.  The underlying storage was 4 disks configured as RAID-0 as this
was the best configuration of storage I had available.  Swap is on a
separate disk.  Dirty ratio was tuned to 40% instead of the default of
20%.

Testing was run with and without monitors to both verify that the patches
were operating as expected and that any performance gain was real and not
due to interference from monitors.

Here is a summary of results based on testing XFS.

512M1P-xfs           Files/s  mean                 32.69 ( 0.00%)     34.44 ( 5.08%)
512M1P-xfs           Elapsed Time fsmark                    51.41     48.29
512M1P-xfs           Elapsed Time simple-wb                114.09    108.61
512M1P-xfs           Elapsed Time mmap-strm                113.46    109.34
512M1P-xfs           Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 62%       63%
512M1P-xfs           Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              56%       61%
512M1P-xfs           Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              44%       42%
512M-xfs             Files/s  mean                 30.78 ( 0.00%)     35.94 (14.36%)
512M-xfs             Elapsed Time fsmark                    56.08     48.90
512M-xfs             Elapsed Time simple-wb                112.22     98.13
512M-xfs             Elapsed Time mmap-strm                219.15    196.67
512M-xfs             Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 54%       56%
512M-xfs             Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              54%       55%
512M-xfs             Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              45%       44%
512M-4X-xfs          Files/s  mean                 30.31 ( 0.00%)     33.33 ( 9.06%)
512M-4X-xfs          Elapsed Time fsmark                    63.26     55.88
512M-4X-xfs          Elapsed Time simple-wb                100.90     90.25
512M-4X-xfs          Elapsed Time mmap-strm                261.73    255.38
512M-4X-xfs          Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 49%       50%
512M-4X-xfs          Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              54%       56%
512M-4X-xfs          Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              37%       36%
512M-16X-xfs         Files/s  mean                 60.89 ( 0.00%)     65.22 ( 6.64%)
512M-16X-xfs         Elapsed Time fsmark                    67.47     58.25
512M-16X-xfs         Elapsed Time simple-wb                103.22     90.89
512M-16X-xfs         Elapsed Time mmap-strm                237.09    198.82
512M-16X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 45%       46%
512M-16X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              53%       55%
512M-16X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              33%       33%

Up until 512-4X, the FSmark improvements were statistically significant.
For the 4X and 16X tests the results were within standard deviations but
just barely.  The time to completion for all tests is improved which is an
important result.  In general, kswapd efficiency is not affected by
skipping dirty pages.

1024M1P-xfs          Files/s  mean                 39.09 ( 0.00%)     41.15 ( 5.01%)
1024M1P-xfs          Elapsed Time fsmark                    84.14     80.41
1024M1P-xfs          Elapsed Time simple-wb                210.77    184.78
1024M1P-xfs          Elapsed Time mmap-strm                162.00    160.34
1024M1P-xfs          Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 69%       75%
1024M1P-xfs          Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              71%       77%
1024M1P-xfs          Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              43%       44%
1024M-xfs            Files/s  mean                 35.45 ( 0.00%)     37.00 ( 4.19%)
1024M-xfs            Elapsed Time fsmark                    94.59     91.00
1024M-xfs            Elapsed Time simple-wb                229.84    195.08
1024M-xfs            Elapsed Time mmap-strm                405.38    440.29
1024M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 79%       71%
1024M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              74%       74%
1024M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              39%       42%
1024M-4X-xfs         Files/s  mean                 32.63 ( 0.00%)     35.05 ( 6.90%)
1024M-4X-xfs         Elapsed Time fsmark                   103.33     97.74
1024M-4X-xfs         Elapsed Time simple-wb                204.48    178.57
1024M-4X-xfs         Elapsed Time mmap-strm                528.38    511.88
1024M-4X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 81%       70%
1024M-4X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              73%       72%
1024M-4X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              39%       38%
1024M-16X-xfs        Files/s  mean                 42.65 ( 0.00%)     42.97 ( 0.74%)
1024M-16X-xfs        Elapsed Time fsmark                   103.11     99.11
1024M-16X-xfs        Elapsed Time simple-wb                200.83    178.24
1024M-16X-xfs        Elapsed Time mmap-strm                397.35    459.82
1024M-16X-xfs        Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 84%       69%
1024M-16X-xfs        Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              74%       73%
1024M-16X-xfs        Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              39%       40%

All FSMark tests up to 16X had statistically significant improvements.
For the most part, tests are completing faster with the exception of the
streaming writes to a mixture of anonymous and file-backed mappings which
were slower in two cases

In the cases where the mmap-strm tests were slower, there was more
swapping due to dirty pages being skipped.  The number of additional pages
swapped is almost identical to the fewer number of pages written from
reclaim.  In other words, roughly the same number of pages were reclaimed
but swapping was slower.  As the test is a bit unrealistic and stresses
memory heavily, the small shift is acceptable.

4608M1P-xfs          Files/s  mean                 29.75 ( 0.00%)     30.96 ( 3.91%)
4608M1P-xfs          Elapsed Time fsmark                   512.01    492.15
4608M1P-xfs          Elapsed Time simple-wb                618.18    566.24
4608M1P-xfs          Elapsed Time mmap-strm                488.05    465.07
4608M1P-xfs          Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 93%       86%
4608M1P-xfs          Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              88%       84%
4608M1P-xfs          Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              46%       45%
4608M-xfs            Files/s  mean                 27.60 ( 0.00%)     28.85 ( 4.33%)
4608M-xfs            Elapsed Time fsmark                   555.96    532.34
4608M-xfs            Elapsed Time simple-wb                659.72    571.85
4608M-xfs            Elapsed Time mmap-strm               1082.57   1146.38
4608M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 89%       91%
4608M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              88%       82%
4608M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              48%       46%
4608M-4X-xfs         Files/s  mean                 26.00 ( 0.00%)     27.47 ( 5.35%)
4608M-4X-xfs         Elapsed Time fsmark                   592.91    564.00
4608M-4X-xfs         Elapsed Time simple-wb                616.65    575.07
4608M-4X-xfs         Elapsed Time mmap-strm               1773.02   1631.53
4608M-4X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 90%       94%
4608M-4X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              87%       82%
4608M-4X-xfs         Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              43%       43%
4608M-16X-xfs        Files/s  mean                 26.07 ( 0.00%)     26.42 ( 1.32%)
4608M-16X-xfs        Elapsed Time fsmark                   602.69    585.78
4608M-16X-xfs        Elapsed Time simple-wb                606.60    573.81
4608M-16X-xfs        Elapsed Time mmap-strm               1549.75   1441.86
4608M-16X-xfs        Kswapd efficiency fsmark                 98%       98%
4608M-16X-xfs        Kswapd efficiency simple-wb              88%       82%
4608M-16X-xfs        Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm              44%       42%

Unlike the other tests, the fsmark results are not statistically
significant but the min and max times are both improved and for the most
part, tests completed faster.

There are other indications that this is an improvement as well.  For
example, in the vast majority of cases, there were fewer pages scanned by
direct reclaim implying in many cases that stalls due to direct reclaim
are reduced.  KSwapd is scanning more due to skipping dirty pages which is
unfortunate but the CPU usage is still acceptable

In an earlier set of tests, I used blktrace and in almost all cases
throughput throughout the entire test was higher.  However, I ended up
discarding those results as recording blktrace data was too heavy for my
liking.

On a laptop, I plugged in a USB stick and ran a similar tests of tests
using it as backing storage.  A desktop environment was running and for
the entire duration of the tests, firefox and gnome terminal were
launching and exiting to vaguely simulate a user.

1024M-xfs            Files/s  mean               0.41 ( 0.00%)        0.44 ( 6.82%)
1024M-xfs            Elapsed Time fsmark               2053.52   1641.03
1024M-xfs            Elapsed Time simple-wb            1229.53    768.05
1024M-xfs            Elapsed Time mmap-strm            4126.44   4597.03
1024M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency fsmark              84%       85%
1024M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency simple-wb           92%       81%
1024M-xfs            Kswapd efficiency mmap-strm           60%       51%
1024M-xfs            Avg wait ms fsmark                5404.53     4473.87
1024M-xfs            Avg wait ms simple-wb             2541.35     1453.54
1024M-xfs            Avg wait ms mmap-strm             3400.25     3852.53

The mmap-strm results were hurt because firefox launching had a tendency
to push the test out of memory.  On the postive side, firefox launched
marginally faster with the patches applied.  Time to completion for many
tests was faster but more importantly - the "Avg wait" time as measured by
iostat was far lower implying the system would be more responsive.  It was
also the case that "Avg wait ms" on the root filesystem was lower.  I
tested it manually and while the system felt slightly more responsive
while copying data to a USB stick, it was marginal enough that it could be
my imagination.

This patch: do not writeback filesystem pages in direct reclaim.

When kswapd is failing to keep zones above the min watermark, a process
will enter direct reclaim in the same manner kswapd does.  If a dirty page
is encountered during the scan, this page is written to backing storage
using mapping->writepage.

This causes two problems.  First, it can result in very deep call stacks,
particularly if the target storage or filesystem are complex.  Some
filesystems ignore write requests from direct reclaim as a result.  The
second is that a single-page flush is inefficient in terms of IO.  While
there is an expectation that the elevator will merge requests, this does
not always happen.  Quoting Christoph Hellwig;

	The elevator has a relatively small window it can operate on,
	and can never fix up a bad large scale writeback pattern.

This patch prevents direct reclaim writing back filesystem pages by
checking if current is kswapd.  Anonymous pages are still written to swap
as there is not the equivalent of a flusher thread for anonymous pages.
If the dirty pages cannot be written back, they are placed back on the LRU
lists.  There is now a direct dependency on dirty page balancing to
prevent too many pages in the system being dirtied which would prevent
reclaim making forward progress.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm: vmscan: remove dead code related to lumpy reclaim waiting on pages under writeback

Lumpy reclaim worked with two passes - the first which queued pages for IO
and the second which waited on writeback.  As direct reclaim can no longer
write pages there is some dead code.  This patch removes it but direct
reclaim will continue to wait on pages under writeback while in
synchronous reclaim mode.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
xfs: warn if direct reclaim tries to writeback pages

Direct reclaim should never writeback pages.  For now, handle the
situation and warn about it.  Ultimately, this will be a BUG_ON.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
ext4: warn if direct reclaim tries to writeback pages

Direct reclaim should never writeback pages.  Warn if an attempt is made.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm: vmscan: do not writeback filesystem pages in kswapd except in high priority

It is preferable that no dirty pages are dispatched for cleaning from the
page reclaim path.  At normal priorities, this patch prevents kswapd
writing pages.

However, page reclaim does have a requirement that pages be freed in a
particular zone.  If it is failing to make sufficient progress (reclaiming
< SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX at any priority priority), the priority is raised to
scan more pages.  A priority of DEF_PRIORITY - 3 is considered to be the
point where kswapd is getting into trouble reclaiming pages.  If this
priority is reached, kswapd will dispatch pages for writing.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm: vmscan: throttle reclaim if encountering too many dirty pages under writeback

Workloads that are allocating frequently and writing files place a large
number of dirty pages on the LRU.  With use-once logic, it is possible for
them to reach the end of the LRU quickly requiring the reclaimer to scan
more to find clean pages.  Ordinarily, processes that are dirtying memory
will get throttled by dirty balancing but this is a global heuristic and
does not take into account that LRUs are maintained on a per-zone basis.
This can lead to a situation whereby reclaim is scanning heavily, skipping
over a large number of pages under writeback and recycling them around the
LRU consuming CPU.

This patch checks how many of the number of pages isolated from the LRU
were dirty and under writeback.  If a percentage of them under writeback,
the process will be throttled if a backing device or the zone is
congested.  Note that this applies whether it is anonymous or file-backed
pages that are under writeback meaning that swapping is potentially
throttled.  This is intentional due to the fact if the swap device is
congested, scanning more pages and dispatching more IO is not going to
help matters.

The percentage that must be in writeback depends on the priority.  At
default priority, all of them must be dirty.  At DEF_PRIORITY-1, 50% of
them must be, DEF_PRIORITY-2, 25% etc.  i.e.  as pressure increases the
greater the likelihood the process will get throttled to allow the flusher
threads to make some progress.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

Conflicts:
	mm/vmscan.c
mm: vmscan: immediately reclaim end-of-LRU dirty pages when writeback completes

When direct reclaim encounters a dirty page, it gets recycled around the
LRU for another cycle.  This patch marks the page PageReclaim similar to
deactivate_page() so that the page gets reclaimed almost immediately after
the page gets cleaned.  This is to avoid reclaiming clean pages that are
younger than a dirty page encountered at the end of the LRU that might
have been something like a use-once page.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
writeback: account per-bdi accumulated dirtied pages

Introduce the BDI_DIRTIED counter. It will be used for estimating the
bdi's dirty bandwidth.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: dirty position control

bdi_position_ratio() provides a scale factor to bdi->dirty_ratelimit, so
that the resulted task rate limit can drive the dirty pages back to the
global/bdi setpoints.

Old scheme is,
                                          |
                           free run area  |  throttle area
  ----------------------------------------+---------------------------->
                                    thresh^                  dirty pages

New scheme is,

  ^ task rate limit
  |
  |            *
  |             *
  |              *
  |[free run]      *      [smooth throttled]
  |                  *
  |                     *
  |                         *
  ..bdi->dirty_ratelimit..........*
  |                               .     *
  |                               .          *
  |                               .              *
  |                               .                 *
  |                               .                    *
  +-------------------------------.-----------------------*------------>
                          setpoint^                  limit^  dirty pages

The slope of the bdi control line should be

1) large enough to pull the dirty pages to setpoint reasonably fast

2) small enough to avoid big fluctuations in the resulted pos_ratio and
   hence task ratelimit

Since the fluctuation range of the bdi dirty pages is typically observed
to be within 1-second worth of data, the bdi control line's slope is
selected to be a linear function of bdi write bandwidth, so that it can
adapt to slow/fast storage devices well.

Assume the bdi control line

	pos_ratio = 1.0 + k * (dirty - bdi_setpoint)

where k is the negative slope.

If targeting for 12.5% fluctuation range in pos_ratio when dirty pages
are fluctuating in range

	[bdi_setpoint - write_bw/2, bdi_setpoint + write_bw/2],

we get slope

	k = - 1 / (8 * write_bw)

Let pos_ratio(x_intercept) = 0, we get the parameter used in code:

	x_intercept = bdi_setpoint + 8 * write_bw

The global/bdi slopes are nicely complementing each other when the
system has only one major bdi (indicated by bdi_thresh ~= thresh):

1) slope of global control line    => scaling to the control scope size
2) slope of main bdi control line  => scaling to the writeout bandwidth

so that

- in memory tight systems, (1) becomes strong enough to squeeze dirty
  pages inside the control scope

- in large memory systems where the "gravity" of (1) for pulling the
  dirty pages to setpoint is too weak, (2) can back (1) up and drive
  dirty pages to bdi_setpoint ~= setpoint reasonably fast.

Unfortunately in JBOD setups, the fluctuation range of bdi threshold
is related to memory size due to the interferences between disks.  In
this case, the bdi slope will be weighted sum of write_bw and bdi_thresh.

Given equations

        span = x_intercept - bdi_setpoint
        k = df/dx = - 1 / span

and the extremum values

        span = bdi_thresh
        dx = bdi_thresh

we get

        df = - dx / span = - 1.0

That means, when bdi_dirty deviates bdi_thresh up, pos_ratio and hence
task ratelimit will fluctuate by -100%.

peter: use 3rd order polynomial for the global control line

CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: add bg_threshold parameter to __bdi_update_bandwidth()

No behavior change.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: dirty rate control

It's all about bdi->dirty_ratelimit, which aims to be (write_bw / N)
when there are N dd tasks.

On write() syscall, use bdi->dirty_ratelimit
============================================

    balance_dirty_pages(pages_dirtied)
    {
        task_ratelimit = bdi->dirty_ratelimit * bdi_position_ratio();
        pause = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit;
        sleep(pause);
    }

On every 200ms, update bdi->dirty_ratelimit
===========================================

    bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit()
    {
        task_ratelimit = bdi->dirty_ratelimit * bdi_position_ratio();
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit * write_bw / dirty_rate;
        bdi->dirty_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit
    }

Estimation of balanced bdi->dirty_ratelimit
===========================================

balanced task_ratelimit
-----------------------

balance_dirty_pages() needs to throttle tasks dirtying pages such that
the total amount of dirty pages stays below the specified dirty limit in
order to avoid memory deadlocks. Furthermore we desire fairness in that
tasks get throttled proportionally to the amount of pages they dirty.

IOW we want to throttle tasks such that we match the dirty rate to the
writeout bandwidth, this yields a stable amount of dirty pages:

        dirty_rate == write_bw                                          (1)

The fairness requirement gives us:

        task_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit
                       == write_bw / N                                  (2)

where N is the number of dd tasks.  We don't know N beforehand, but
still can estimate balanced_dirty_ratelimit within 200ms.

Start by throttling each dd task at rate

        task_ratelimit = task_ratelimit_0                               (3)
                         (any non-zero initial value is OK)

After 200ms, we measured

        dirty_rate = # of pages dirtied by all dd's / 200ms
        write_bw   = # of pages written to the disk / 200ms

For the aggressive dd dirtiers, the equality holds

        dirty_rate == N * task_rate
                   == N * task_ratelimit_0                              (4)
Or
        task_ratelimit_0 == dirty_rate / N                              (5)

Now we conclude that the balanced task ratelimit can be estimated by

                                                      write_bw
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit = task_ratelimit_0 * ----------        (6)
                                                      dirty_rate

Because with (4) and (5) we can get the desired equality (1):

                                                       write_bw
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit == (dirty_rate / N) * ----------
                                                       dirty_rate
                                 == write_bw / N

Then using the balanced task ratelimit we can compute task pause times like:

        task_pause = task->nr_dirtied / task_ratelimit

task_ratelimit with position control
------------------------------------

However, while the above gives us means of matching the dirty rate to
the writeout bandwidth, it at best provides us with a stable dirty page
count (assuming a static system). In order to control the dirty page
count such that it is high enough to provide performance, but does not
exceed the specified limit we need another control.

The dirty position control works by extending (2) to

        task_ratelimit = balanced_dirty_ratelimit * pos_ratio           (7)

where pos_ratio is a negative feedback function that subjects to

1) f(setpoint) = 1.0
2) df/dx < 0

That is, if the dirty pages are ABOVE the setpoint, we throttle each
task a bit more HEAVY than balanced_dirty_ratelimit, so that the dirty
pages are created less fast than they are cleaned, thus DROP to the
setpoints (and the reverse).

Based on (7) and the assumption that both dirty_ratelimit and pos_ratio
remains CONSTANT for the past 200ms, we get

        task_ratelimit_0 = balanced_dirty_ratelimit * pos_ratio         (8)

Putting (8) into (6), we get the formula used in
bdi_update_dirty_ratelimit():

                                                write_bw
        balanced_dirty_ratelimit *= pos_ratio * ----------              (9)
                                                dirty_rate

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: stabilize bdi->dirty_ratelimit

There are some imperfections in balanced_dirty_ratelimit.

1) large fluctuations

The dirty_rate used for computing balanced_dirty_ratelimit is merely
averaged in the past 200ms (very small comparing to the 3s estimation
period for write_bw), which makes rather dispersed distribution of
balanced_dirty_ratelimit.

It's pretty hard to average out the singular points by increasing the
estimation period. Considering that the averaging technique will
introduce very undesirable time lags, I give it up totally. (btw, the 3s
write_bw averaging time lag is much more acceptable because its impact
is one-way and therefore won't lead to oscillations.)

The more practical way is filtering -- most singular
balanced_dirty_ratelimit points can be filtered out by remembering some
prev_balanced_rate and prev_prev_balanced_rate. However the more
reliable way is to guard balanced_dirty_ratelimit with task_ratelimit.

2) due to truncates and fs redirties, the (write_bw <=> dirty_rate)
match could become unbalanced, which may lead to large systematical
errors in balanced_dirty_ratelimit. The truncates, due to its possibly
bumpy nature, can hardly be compensated smoothly. So let's face it. When
some over-estimated balanced_dirty_ratelimit brings dirty_ratelimit
high, dirty pages will go higher than the setpoint. task_ratelimit will
in turn become lower than dirty_ratelimit.  So if we consider both
balanced_dirty_ratelimit and task_ratelimit and update dirty_ratelimit
only when they are on the same side of dirty_ratelimit, the systematical
errors in balanced_dirty_ratelimit won't be able to bring
dirty_ratelimit far away.

The balanced_dirty_ratelimit estimation may also be inaccurate near
@limit or @freerun, however is less an issue.

3) since we ultimately want to

- keep the fluctuations of task ratelimit as small as possible
- keep the dirty pages around the setpoint as long time as possible

the update policy used for (2) also serves the above goals nicely:
if for some reason the dirty pages are high (task_ratelimit < dirty_ratelimit),
and dirty_ratelimit is low (dirty_ratelimit < balanced_dirty_ratelimit),
there is no point to bring up dirty_ratelimit in a hurry only to hurt
both the above two goals.

So, we make use of task_ratelimit to limit the update of dirty_ratelimit
in two ways:

1) avoid changing dirty rate when it's against the position control target
   (the adjusted rate will slow down the progress of dirty pages going
   back to setpoint).

2) limit the step size. task_ratelimit is changing values step by step,
   leaving a consistent trace comparing to the randomly jumping
   balanced_dirty_ratelimit. task_ratelimit also has the nice smaller
   errors in stable state and typically larger errors when there are big
   errors in rate.  So it's a pretty good limiting factor for the step
   size of dirty_ratelimit.

Note that bdi->dirty_ratelimit is always tracking balanced_dirty_ratelimit.
task_ratelimit is merely used as a limiting factor.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: per task dirty rate limit

Add two fields to task_struct.

1) account dirtied pages in the individual tasks, for accuracy
2) per-task balance_dirty_pages() call intervals, for flexibility

The balance_dirty_pages() call interval (ie. nr_dirtied_pause) will
scale near-sqrt to the safety gap between dirty pages and threshold.

The main problem of per-task nr_dirtied is, if 1k+ tasks start dirtying
pages at exactly the same time, each task will be assigned a large
initial nr_dirtied_pause, so that the dirty threshold will be exceeded
long before each task reached its nr_dirtied_pause and hence call
balance_dirty_pages().

The solution is to watch for the number of pages dirtied on each CPU in
between the calls into balance_dirty_pages(). If it exceeds ratelimit_pages
(3% dirty threshold), force call balance_dirty_pages() for a chance to
set bdi->dirty_exceeded. In normal situations, this safeguarding
condition is not expected to trigger at all.

On the sqrt in dirty_poll_interval():

It will serve as an initial guess when dirty pages are still in the
freerun area.

When dirty pages are floating inside the dirty control scope [freerun,
limit], a followup patch will use some refined dirty poll interval to
get the desired pause time.

   thresh-dirty (MB)    sqrt
		   1      16
		   2      22
		   4      32
		   8      45
		  16      64
		  32      90
		  64     128
		 128     181
		 256     256
		 512     362
		1024     512

The above table means, given 1MB (or 1GB) gap and the dd tasks polling
balance_dirty_pages() on every 16 (or 512) pages, the dirty limit won't
be exceeded as long as there are less than 16 (or 512) concurrent dd's.

So sqrt naturally leads to less overheads and more safe concurrent tasks
for large memory servers, which have large (thresh-freerun) gaps.

peter: keep the per-CPU ratelimit for safeguarding the 1k+ tasks case

CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Reviewed-by: Andrea Righi <andrea@betterlinux.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: IO-less balance_dirty_pages()

As proposed by Chris, Dave and Jan, don't start foreground writeback IO
inside balance_dirty_pages(). Instead, simply let it idle sleep for some
time to throttle the dirtying task. In the mean while, kick off the
per-bdi flusher thread to do background writeback IO.

RATIONALS
=========

- disk seeks on concurrent writeback of multiple inodes (Dave Chinner)

  If every thread doing writes and being throttled start foreground
  writeback, it leads to N IO submitters from at least N different
  inodes at the same time, end up with N different sets of IO being
  issued with potentially zero locality to each other, resulting in
  much lower elevator sort/merge efficiency and hence we seek the disk
  all over the place to service the different sets of IO.
  OTOH, if there is only one submission thread, it doesn't jump between
  inodes in the same way when congestion clears - it keeps writing to
  the same inode, resulting in large related chunks of sequential IOs
  being issued to the disk. This is more efficient than the above
  foreground writeback because the elevator works better and the disk
  seeks less.

- lock contention and cache bouncing on concurrent IO submitters (Dave Chinner)

  With this patchset, the fs_mark benchmark on a 12-drive software RAID0 goes
  from CPU bound to IO bound, freeing "3-4 CPUs worth of spinlock contention".

  * "CPU usage has dropped by ~55%", "it certainly appears that most of
    the CPU time saving comes from the removal of contention on the
    inode_wb_list_lock" (IMHO at least 10% comes from the reduction of
    cacheline bouncing, because the new code is able to call much less
    frequently into balance_dirty_pages() and hence access the global
    page states)

  * the user space "App overhead" is reduced by 20%, by avoiding the
    cacheline pollution by the complex writeback code path

  * "for a ~5% throughput reduction", "the number of write IOs have
    dropped by ~25%", and the elapsed time reduced from 41:42.17 to
    40:53.23.

  * On a simple test of 100 dd, it reduces the CPU %system time from 30% to 3%,
    and improves IO throughput from 38MB/s to 42MB/s.

- IO size too small for fast arrays and too large for slow USB sticks

  The write_chunk used by current balance_dirty_pages() cannot be
  directly set to some large value (eg. 128MB) for better IO efficiency.
  Because it could lead to more than 1 second user perceivable stalls.
  Even the current 4MB write size may be too large for slow USB sticks.
  The fact that balance_dirty_pages() starts IO on itself couples the
  IO size to wait time, which makes it hard to do suitable IO size while
  keeping the wait time under control.

  Now it's possible to increase writeback chunk size proportional to the
  disk bandwidth. In a simple test of 50 dd's on XFS, 1-HDD, 3GB ram,
  the larger writeback size dramatically reduces the seek count to 1/10
  (far beyond my expectation) and improves the write throughput by 24%.

- long block time in balance_dirty_pages() hurts desktop responsiveness

  Many of us may have the experience: it often takes a couple of seconds
  or even long time to stop a heavy writing dd/cp/tar command with
  Ctrl-C or "kill -9".

- IO pipeline broken by bumpy write() progress

  There are a broad class of "loop {read(buf); write(buf);}" applications
  whose read() pipeline will be under-utilized or even come to a stop if
  the write()s have long latencies _or_ don't progress in a constant rate.
  The current threshold based throttling inherently transfers the large
  low level IO completion fluctuations to bumpy application write()s,
  and further deteriorates with increasing number of dirtiers and/or bdi's.

  For example, when doing 50 dd's + 1 remote rsync to an XFS partition,
  the rsync progresses very bumpy in legacy kernel, and throughput is
  improved by 67% by this patchset. (plus the larger write chunk size,
  it will be 93% speedup).

  The new rate based throttling can support 1000+ dd's with excellent
  smoothness, low latency and low overheads.

For the above reasons, it's much better to do IO-less and low latency
pauses in balance_dirty_pages().

Jan Kara, Dave Chinner and me explored the scheme to let
balance_dirty_pages() wait for enough writeback IO completions to
safeguard the dirty limit. However it's found to have two problems:

- in large NUMA systems, the per-cpu counters may have big accounting
  errors, leading to big throttle wait time and jitters.

- NFS may kill large amount of unstable pages with one single COMMIT.
  Because NFS server serves COMMIT with expensive fsync() IOs, it is
  desirable to delay and reduce the number of COMMITs. So it's not
  likely to optimize away such kind of bursty IO completions, and the
  resulted large (and tiny) stall times in IO completion based throttling.

So here is a pause time oriented approach, which tries to control the
pause time in each balance_dirty_pages() invocations, by controlling
the number of pages dirtied before calling balance_dirty_pages(), for
smooth and efficient dirty throttling:

- avoid useless (eg. zero pause time) balance_dirty_pages() calls
- avoid too small pause time (less than   4ms, which burns CPU power)
- avoid too large pause time (more than 200ms, which hurts responsiveness)
- avoid big fluctuations of pause times

It can control pause times at will. The default policy (in a followup
patch) will be to do ~10ms pauses in 1-dd case, and increase to ~100ms
in 1000-dd case.

BEHAVIOR CHANGE
===============

(1) dirty threshold

Users will notice that the applications will get throttled once crossing
the global (background + dirty)/2=15% threshold, and then balanced around
17.5%. Before patch, the behavior is to just throttle it at 20% dirtyable
memory in 1-dd case.

Since the task will be soft throttled earlier than before, it may be
perceived by end users as performance "slow down" if his application
happens to dirty more than 15% dirtyable memory.

(2) smoothness/responsiveness

Users will notice a more responsive system during heavy writeback.
"killall dd" will take effect instantly.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: limit max dirty pause time

Apply two policies to scale down the max pause time for

1) small number of concurrent dirtiers
2) small memory system (comparing to storage bandwidth)

MAX_PAUSE=200ms may only be suitable for high end servers with lots of
concurrent dirtiers, where the large pause time can reduce much overheads.

Otherwise, smaller pause time is desirable whenever possible, so as to
get good responsiveness and smooth user experiences. It's actually
required for good disk utilization in the case when all the dirty pages
can be synced to disk within MAX_PAUSE=200ms.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: control dirty pause time

The dirty pause time shall ultimately be controlled by adjusting
nr_dirtied_pause, since there is relationship

	pause = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit

Assuming

	pages_dirtied ~= nr_dirtied_pause
	task_ratelimit ~= dirty_ratelimit

We get

	nr_dirtied_pause ~= dirty_ratelimit * desired_pause

Here dirty_ratelimit is preferred over task_ratelimit because it's
more stable.

It's also important to limit possible large transitional errors:

- bw is changing quickly
- pages_dirtied << nr_dirtied_pause on entering dirty exceeded area
- pages_dirtied >> nr_dirtied_pause on btrfs (to be improved by a
  separate fix, but still expect non-trivial errors)

So we end up using the above formula inside clamp_val().

The best test case for this code is to run 100 "dd bs=4M" tasks on
btrfs and check its pause time distribution.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: dirty position control - bdi reserve area

Keep a minimal pool of dirty pages for each bdi, so that the disk IO
queues won't underrun. Also gently increase a small bdi_thresh to avoid
it stuck in 0 for some light dirtied bdi.

It's particularly useful for JBOD and small memory system.

It may result in (pos_ratio > 1) at the setpoint and push the dirty
pages high. This is more or less intended because the bdi is in the
danger of IO queue underflow.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: per-bdi background threshold

One thing puzzled me is that in JBOD case, the per-disk writeout
performance is smaller than the corresponding single-disk case even
when they have comparable bdi_thresh. Tracing shows find that in single
disk case, bdi_writeback is always kept high while in JBOD case, it
could drop low from time to time and correspondingly bdi_reclaimable
could sometimes rush high.

The fix is to watch bdi_reclaimable and kick background writeback as
soon as it goes high. This resembles the global background threshold
but in per-bdi manner. The trick is, as long as bdi_reclaimable does
not go high, bdi_writeback naturally won't go low because
bdi_reclaimable+bdi_writeback ~= bdi_thresh.

With less fluctuated writeback pages, JBOD performance is observed to
increase noticeably in various cases.

vmstat:nr_written values before/after patch:

  3.1.0-rc4-wo-underrun+      3.1.0-rc4-bgthresh3+
------------------------  ------------------------
               125596480       +25.9%    158179363  JBOD-10HDD-16G/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                61790815      +110.4%    130032231  JBOD-10HDD-16G/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                58853546        -0.1%     58823828  JBOD-10HDD-16G/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
               110159811       +24.7%    137355377  JBOD-10HDD-16G/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                69544762       +10.8%     77080047  JBOD-10HDD-16G/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                50644862        +0.5%     50890006  JBOD-10HDD-16G/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-20:10-X
                42677090       +28.0%     54643527  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                47491324       +13.3%     53785605  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                52548986        +0.9%     53001031  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                26783091       +36.8%     36650248  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                35526347       +14.0%     40492312  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
                44670723        -1.1%     44177606  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=100M/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-100M:10-X
               127996037       +22.4%    156719990  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                57518856        +3.8%     59677625  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                51919909       +12.2%     58269894  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                86410514       +79.0%    154660433  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                40132519       +38.6%     55617893  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
                48423248        +7.5%     52042927  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=2G/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-2048M:10-X
               206041046       +44.1%    296846536  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=4G/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-4096M:10-X
                72312903       -19.4%     58272885  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=4G/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-4096M:10-X
                50635672        -0.5%     50384787  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=4G/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-4096M:10-X
                68308534      +115.7%    147324758  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/ext4-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                57882933       +14.5%     66269621  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/ext4-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                52183472       +12.8%     58855181  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/ext4-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                53788956       +94.2%    104460352  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/xfs-100dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                44493342       +35.5%     60298210  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/xfs-10dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X
                42641209       +18.9%     50681038  JBOD-10HDD-thresh=800M/xfs-1dd-1M-24p-16384M-800M:10-X

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>

Conflicts:
	fs/fs-writeback.c
writeback: trace event bdi_dirty_ratelimit

It helps understand how various throttle bandwidths are updated.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
writeback: trace event balance_dirty_pages

Useful for analyzing the dynamics of the throttling algorithms and
debugging user reported problems.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>