xfs: refine the allocation stack switch
The allocation stack switch at xfs_bmapi_allocate() has served it's purpose, but is no longer a sufficient solution to the stack usage problem we have in the XFS allocation path. Whilst the kernel stack size is now 16k, that is not a valid reason for undoing all our "keep stack usage down" modifications. What it does allow us to do is have the freedom to refine and perfect the modifications knowing that if we get it wrong it won't blow up in our faces - we have a safety net now. This is important because we still have the issue of older kernels having smaller stacks and that they are still supported and are demonstrating a wide range of different stack overflows. Red Hat has several open bugs for allocation based stack overflows from directory modifications and direct IO block allocation and these problems still need to be solved. If we can solve them upstream, then distro's won't need to bake their own unique solutions. To that end, I've observed that every allocation based stack overflow report has had a specific characteristic - it has happened during or directly after a bmap btree block split. That event requires a new block to be allocated to the tree, and so we effectively stack one allocation stack on top of another, and that's when we get into trouble. A further observation is that bmap btree block splits are much rarer than writeback allocation - over a range of different workloads I've observed the ratio of bmap btree inserts to splits ranges from 100:1 (xfstests run) to 10000:1 (local VM image server with sparse files that range in the hundreds of thousands to millions of extents). Either way, bmap btree split events are much, much rarer than allocation events. Finally, we have to move the kswapd state to the allocation workqueue work when allocation is done on behalf of kswapd. This is proving to cause significant perturbation in performance under memory pressure and appears to be generating allocation deadlock warnings under some workloads, so avoiding the use of a workqueue for the majority of kswapd writeback allocation will minimise the impact of such behaviour. Hence it makes sense to move the stack switch to xfs_btree_split() and only do it for bmap btree splits. Stack switches during allocation will be much rarer, so there won't be significant performacne overhead caused by switching stacks. The worse case stack from all allocation paths will be split, not just writeback. And the majority of memory allocations will be done in the correct context (e.g. kswapd) without causing additional latency, and so we simplify the memory reclaim interactions between processes, workqueues and kswapd. The worst stack I've been able to generate with this patch in place is 5600 bytes deep. It's very revealing because we exit XFS at: 37) 1768 64 kmem_cache_alloc+0x13b/0x170 about 1800 bytes of stack consumed, and the remaining 3800 bytes (and 36 functions) is memory reclaim, swap and the IO stack. And this occurs in the inode allocation from an open(O_CREAT) syscall, not writeback. The amount of stack being used is much less than I've previously be able to generate - fs_mark testing has been able to generate stack usage of around 7k without too much trouble; with this patch it's only just getting to 5.5k. This is primarily because the metadata allocation paths (e.g. directory blocks) are no longer causing double splits on the same stack, and hence now stack tracing is showing swapping being the worst stack consumer rather than XFS. Performance of fs_mark inode create workloads is unchanged. Performance of fs_mark async fsync workloads is consistently good with context switches reduced by around 150,000/s (30%). Performance of dbench, streaming IO and postmark is unchanged. Allocation deadlock warnings have not been seen on the workloads that generated them since adding this patch. Signed-off-by:Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by:
Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com> Signed-off-by:
Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
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