• Dave Chinner's avatar
    xfs: allocate log vector buffers outside CIL context lock · b1c5ebb2
    Dave Chinner authored
    One of the problems we currently have with delayed logging is that
    under serious memory pressure we can deadlock memory reclaim. THis
    occurs when memory reclaim (such as run by kswapd) is reclaiming XFS
    inodes and issues a log force to unpin inodes that are dirty in the
    CIL.
    
    The CIL is pushed, but this will only occur once it gets the CIL
    context lock to ensure that all committing transactions are complete
    and no new transactions start being committed to the CIL while the
    push switches to a new context.
    
    The deadlock occurs when the CIL context lock is held by a
    committing process that is doing memory allocation for log vector
    buffers, and that allocation is then blocked on memory reclaim
    making progress. Memory reclaim, however, is blocked waiting for
    a log force to make progress, and so we effectively deadlock at this
    point.
    
    To solve this problem, we have to move the CIL log vector buffer
    allocation outside of the context lock so that memory reclaim can
    always make progress when it needs to force the log. The problem
    with doing this is that a CIL push can take place while we are
    determining if we need to allocate a new log vector buffer for
    an item and hence the current log vector may go away without
    warning. That means we canot rely on the existing log vector being
    present when we finally grab the context lock and so we must have a
    replacement buffer ready to go at all times.
    
    To ensure this, introduce a "shadow log vector" buffer that is
    always guaranteed to be present when we gain the CIL context lock
    and format the item. This shadow buffer may or may not be used
    during the formatting, but if the log item does not have an existing
    log vector buffer or that buffer is too small for the new
    modifications, we swap it for the new shadow buffer and format
    the modifications into that new log vector buffer.
    
    The result of this is that for any object we modify more than once
    in a given CIL checkpoint, we double the memory required
    to track dirty regions in the log. For single modifications then
    we consume the shadow log vectorwe allocate on commit, and that gets
    consumed by the checkpoint. However, if we make multiple
    modifications, then the second transaction commit will allocate a
    shadow log vector and hence we will end up with double the memory
    usage as only one of the log vectors is consumed by the CIL
    checkpoint. The remaining shadow vector will be freed when th elog
    item is freed.
    
    This can probably be optimised in future - access to the shadow log
    vector is serialised by the object lock (as opposited to the active
    log vector, which is controlled by the CIL context lock) and so we
    can probably free shadow log vector from some objects when the log
    item is marked clean on removal from the AIL.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarBrian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
    b1c5ebb2
xfs_inode_item.c 22.9 KB