Commit 33b8f7c2 authored by Christoph Hellwig's avatar Christoph Hellwig

xfs: improve sync behaviour in the face of aggressive dirtying

The following script from Wu Fengguang shows very bad behaviour in XFS
when aggressively dirtying data during a sync on XFS, with sync times
up to almost 10 times as long as ext4.

A large part of the issue is that XFS writes data out itself two times
in the ->sync_fs method, overriding the livelock protection in the core
writeback code, and another issue is the lock-less xfs_ioend_wait call,
which doesn't prevent new ioend from being queue up while waiting for
the count to reach zero.

This patch removes the XFS-internal sync calls and relies on the VFS
to do it's work just like all other filesystems do.  Note that the
i_iocount wait which is rather suboptimal is simply removed here.
We already do it in ->write_inode, which keeps the current supoptimal
behaviour.  We'll eventually need to remove that as well, but that's
material for a separate commit.

------------------------------ snip ------------------------------
#!/bin/sh

umount /dev/sda7
mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sda7
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda7
# mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda7
mount /dev/sda7 /fs

echo $((50<<20)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes

pid=
for i in `seq 10`
do
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero-$i bs=1M count=1000 &
	pid="$pid $!"
done

sleep 1

tic=$(date +'%s')
sync
tac=$(date +'%s')

echo
echo sync time: $((tac-tic))
egrep '(Dirty|Writeback|NFS_Unstable)' /proc/meminfo

pidof dd > /dev/null && { kill -9 $pid; echo sync NOT livelocked; }
------------------------------ snip ------------------------------
Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reported-by: default avatarWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarAlex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
parent 8f04c47a
...@@ -359,14 +359,12 @@ xfs_quiesce_data( ...@@ -359,14 +359,12 @@ xfs_quiesce_data(
{ {
int error, error2 = 0; int error, error2 = 0;
/* push non-blocking */
xfs_sync_data(mp, 0);
xfs_qm_sync(mp, SYNC_TRYLOCK); xfs_qm_sync(mp, SYNC_TRYLOCK);
/* push and block till complete */
xfs_sync_data(mp, SYNC_WAIT);
xfs_qm_sync(mp, SYNC_WAIT); xfs_qm_sync(mp, SYNC_WAIT);
/* force out the newly dirtied log buffers */
xfs_log_force(mp, XFS_LOG_SYNC);
/* write superblock and hoover up shutdown errors */ /* write superblock and hoover up shutdown errors */
error = xfs_sync_fsdata(mp); error = xfs_sync_fsdata(mp);
......
Markdown is supported
0%
or
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment