• Dave Chinner's avatar
    xfs: AIL doesn't need manual pushing · 9adf4024
    Dave Chinner authored
    We have a mechanism that checks the amount of log space remaining
    available every time we make a transaction reservation. If the
    amount of space is below a threshold (25% free) we push on the AIL
    to tell it to do more work. To do this, we end up calculating the
    LSN that the AIL needs to push to on every reservation and updating
    the push target for the AIL with that new target LSN.
    
    This is silly and expensive. The AIL is perfectly capable of
    calculating the push target itself, and it will always be running
    when the AIL contains objects.
    
    What the target does is determine if the AIL needs to do
    any work before it goes back to sleep. If we haven't run out of
    reservation space or memory (or some other push all trigger), it
    will simply go back to sleep for a while if there is more than 25%
    of the journal space free without doing anything.
    
    If there are items in the AIL at a lower LSN than the target, it
    will try to push up to the target or to the point of getting stuck
    before going back to sleep and trying again soon after.`
    
    Hence we can modify the AIL to calculate it's own 25% push target
    before it starts a push using the same reserve grant head based
    calculation as is currently used, and remove all the places where we
    ask the AIL to push to a new 25% free target. We can also drop the
    minimum free space size of 256BBs from the calculation because the
    25% of a minimum sized log is *always going to be larger than
    256BBs.
    
    This does still require a manual push in certain circumstances.
    These circumstances arise when the AIL is not full, but the
    reservation grants consume the entire of the free space in the log.
    In this case, we still need to push on the AIL to free up space, so
    when we hit this condition (i.e. reservation going to sleep to wait
    on log space) we do a single push to tell the AIL it should empty
    itself. This will keep the AIL moving as new reservations come in
    and want more space, rather than keep queuing them and having to
    push the AIL repeatedly.
    
    The reason for using the "push all" when grant space runs out is
    that we can run out of grant space when there is more than 25% of
    the log free. Small logs are notorious for this, and we have a hack
    in the log callback code (xlog_state_set_callback()) where we push
    the AIL because the *head* moved) to ensure that we kick the AIL
    when we consume space in it because that can push us over the "less
    than 25% available" available that starts tail pushing back up
    again.
    
    Hence when we run out of grant space and are going to sleep, we have
    to consider that the grant space may be consuming almost all the log
    space and there is almost nothing in the AIL. In this situation, the
    AIL pins the tail and moving the tail forwards is the only way the
    grant space will come available, so we have to force the AIL to push
    everything to guarantee grant space will eventually be returned.
    Hence triggering a "push all" just before sleeping removes all the
    nasty corner cases we have in other parts of the code that work
    around the "we didn't ask the AIL to push enough to free grant
    space" condition that leads to log space hangs...
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarDarrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChandan Babu R <chandanbabu@kernel.org>
    9adf4024
xfs_defer.c 34 KB