• Peter Zijlstra's avatar
    mm: per device dirty threshold · 04fbfdc1
    Peter Zijlstra authored
    Scale writeback cache per backing device, proportional to its writeout speed.
    
    By decoupling the BDI dirty thresholds a number of problems we currently have
    will go away, namely:
    
     - mutual interference starvation (for any number of BDIs);
     - deadlocks with stacked BDIs (loop, FUSE and local NFS mounts).
    
    It might be that all dirty pages are for a single BDI while other BDIs are
    idling. By giving each BDI a 'fair' share of the dirty limit, each one can have
    dirty pages outstanding and make progress.
    
    A global threshold also creates a deadlock for stacked BDIs; when A writes to
    B, and A generates enough dirty pages to get throttled, B will never start
    writeback until the dirty pages go away. Again, by giving each BDI its own
    'independent' dirty limit, this problem is avoided.
    
    So the problem is to determine how to distribute the total dirty limit across
    the BDIs fairly and efficiently. A DBI that has a large dirty limit but does
    not have any dirty pages outstanding is a waste.
    
    What is done is to keep a floating proportion between the DBIs based on
    writeback completions. This way faster/more active devices get a larger share
    than slower/idle devices.
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix warnings]
    [hugh@veritas.com: Fix occasional hang when a task couldn't get out of balance_dirty_pages]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    04fbfdc1
backing-dev.c 2.03 KB