[dm-devel] [PATCH] dm: Avoid sleeping while holding the dm_bufio lock
Doug Anderson
dianders at chromium.org
Thu Dec 15 00:53:16 UTC 2016
Hi,
On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 12:57 PM, Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> The GFP_NOIO allocation frees clean cached pages. The GFP_NOWAIT
> allocation doesn't. Your patch would incorrectly reuse buffers in a
> situation when the memory is filled with clean cached pages.
>
> Here I'm proposing an alternate patch that first tries GFP_NOWAIT
> allocation, then drops the lock and tries GFP_NOIO allocation.
>
> Note that the root cause why you are seeing this stacktrace is, that your
> block device is congested - i.e. there are too many requests in the
> device's queue - and note that fixing this wait won't fix the root cause
> (congested device).
>
> The congestion limits are set in blk_queue_congestion_threshold to 7/8 to
> 13/16 size of the nr_requests value.
>
> If you don't want your device to report the congested status, you can
> increase /sys/block/<device>/queue/nr_requests - you should test if your
> chromebook is faster of slower with this setting increased. But note that
> this setting won't increase the IO-per-second of the device.
>
> Mikulas
>
>
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, Douglas Anderson wrote:
>
>> We've seen in-field reports showing _lots_ (18 in one case, 41 in
>> another) of tasks all sitting there blocked on:
>>
>> mutex_lock+0x4c/0x68
>> dm_bufio_shrink_count+0x38/0x78
>> shrink_slab.part.54.constprop.65+0x100/0x464
>> shrink_zone+0xa8/0x198
>>
>> In the two cases analyzed, we see one task that looks like this:
>>
>> Workqueue: kverityd verity_prefetch_io
>>
>> __switch_to+0x9c/0xa8
>> __schedule+0x440/0x6d8
>> schedule+0x94/0xb4
>> schedule_timeout+0x204/0x27c
>> schedule_timeout_uninterruptible+0x44/0x50
>> wait_iff_congested+0x9c/0x1f0
>> shrink_inactive_list+0x3a0/0x4cc
>> shrink_lruvec+0x418/0x5cc
>> shrink_zone+0x88/0x198
>> try_to_free_pages+0x51c/0x588
>> __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x648/0xa88
>> __get_free_pages+0x34/0x7c
>> alloc_buffer+0xa4/0x144
>> __bufio_new+0x84/0x278
>> dm_bufio_prefetch+0x9c/0x154
>> verity_prefetch_io+0xe8/0x10c
>> process_one_work+0x240/0x424
>> worker_thread+0x2fc/0x424
>> kthread+0x10c/0x114
>>
>> ...and that looks to be the one holding the mutex.
>>
>> The problem has been reproduced on fairly easily:
>> 0. Be running Chrome OS w/ verity enabled on the root filesystem
>> 1. Pick test patch: http://crosreview.com/412360
>> 2. Install launchBalloons.sh and balloon.arm from
>> http://crbug.com/468342
>> ...that's just a memory stress test app.
>> 3. On a 4GB rk3399 machine, run
>> nice ./launchBalloons.sh 4 900 100000
>> ...that tries to eat 4 * 900 MB of memory and keep accessing.
>> 4. Login to the Chrome web browser and restore many tabs
>>
>> With that, I've seen printouts like:
>> DOUG: long bufio 90758 ms
>> ...and stack trace always show's we're in dm_bufio_prefetch().
>>
>> The problem is that we try to allocate memory with GFP_NOIO while
>> we're holding the dm_bufio lock. Instead we should be using
>> GFP_NOWAIT. Using GFP_NOIO can cause us to sleep while holding the
>> lock and that causes the above problems.
>>
>> The current behavior explained by David Rientjes:
>>
>> It will still try reclaim initially because __GFP_WAIT (or
>> __GFP_KSWAPD_RECLAIM) is set by GFP_NOIO. This is the cause of
>> contention on dm_bufio_lock() that the thread holds. You want to
>> pass GFP_NOWAIT instead of GFP_NOIO to alloc_buffer() when holding a
>> mutex that can be contended by a concurrent slab shrinker (if
>> count_objects didn't use a trylock, this pattern would trivially
>> deadlock).
>>
>> Suggested-by: David Rientjes <rientjes at google.com>
>> Signed-off-by: Douglas Anderson <dianders at chromium.org>
>> ---
>> Note that this change was developed and tested against the Chrome OS
>> 4.4 kernel tree, not mainline. Due to slight differences in verity
>> between mainline and Chrome OS it became too difficult to reproduce my
>> testing setup on mainline. This patch still seems correct and
>> relevant to upstream, so I'm posting it. If this is not acceptible to
>> you then please ignore this patch.
>>
>> Also note that when I tested the Chrome OS 3.14 kernel tree I couldn't
>> reproduce the long delays described in the patch. Presumably
>> something changed in either the kernel config or the memory management
>> code between the two kernel versions that made this crop up. In a
>> similar vein, it is possible that problems described in this patch are
>> no longer reproducible upstream. However, the arguments made in this
>> patch (that we don't want to block while holding the mutex) still
>> apply so I think the patch may still have merit.
>>
>> drivers/md/dm-bufio.c | 6 ++++--
>> 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c b/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c
>> index b3ba142e59a4..3c767399cc59 100644
>> --- a/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c
>> +++ b/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c
>> @@ -827,7 +827,8 @@ static struct dm_buffer *__alloc_buffer_wait_no_callback(struct dm_bufio_client
>> * dm-bufio is resistant to allocation failures (it just keeps
>> * one buffer reserved in cases all the allocations fail).
>> * So set flags to not try too hard:
>> - * GFP_NOIO: don't recurse into the I/O layer
>> + * GFP_NOWAIT: don't wait; if we need to sleep we'll release our
>> + * mutex and wait ourselves.
>> * __GFP_NORETRY: don't retry and rather return failure
>> * __GFP_NOMEMALLOC: don't use emergency reserves
>> * __GFP_NOWARN: don't print a warning in case of failure
>> @@ -837,7 +838,8 @@ static struct dm_buffer *__alloc_buffer_wait_no_callback(struct dm_bufio_client
>> */
>> while (1) {
>> if (dm_bufio_cache_size_latch != 1) {
>> - b = alloc_buffer(c, GFP_NOIO | __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN);
>> + b = alloc_buffer(c, GFP_NOWAIT | __GFP_NORETRY |
>> + __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN);
>> if (b)
>> return b;
>> }
>> --
>> 2.8.0.rc3.226.g39d4020
>>
>> --
>> dm-devel mailing list
>> dm-devel at redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
>>
>
> From: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka at redhat.com>
>
> Subject: dm-bufio: drop the lock when doing GFP_NOIO alloaction
>
> Drop the lock when doing GFP_NOIO alloaction beacuse the allocation can
> take some time.
>
> Note that we won't do GFP_NOIO allocation when we loop for the second
> time, because the lock shouldn't be dropped between __wait_for_free_buffer
> and __get_unclaimed_buffer.
>
> Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka at redhat.com>
>
> ---
> drivers/md/dm-bufio.c | 13 ++++++++++++-
> 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> Index: linux-2.6/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c
> ===================================================================
> --- linux-2.6.orig/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c
> +++ linux-2.6/drivers/md/dm-bufio.c
> @@ -822,11 +822,13 @@ enum new_flag {
> static struct dm_buffer *__alloc_buffer_wait_no_callback(struct dm_bufio_client *c, enum new_flag nf)
> {
> struct dm_buffer *b;
> + bool tried_noio_alloc = false;
>
> /*
> * dm-bufio is resistant to allocation failures (it just keeps
> * one buffer reserved in cases all the allocations fail).
> * So set flags to not try too hard:
> + * GFP_NOWAIT: don't sleep and don't release cache
> * GFP_NOIO: don't recurse into the I/O layer
> * __GFP_NORETRY: don't retry and rather return failure
> * __GFP_NOMEMALLOC: don't use emergency reserves
> @@ -837,7 +839,7 @@ static struct dm_buffer *__alloc_buffer_
> */
> while (1) {
> if (dm_bufio_cache_size_latch != 1) {
> - b = alloc_buffer(c, GFP_NOIO | __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN);
> + b = alloc_buffer(c, GFP_NOWAIT | __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN);
> if (b)
> return b;
> }
> @@ -845,6 +847,15 @@ static struct dm_buffer *__alloc_buffer_
> if (nf == NF_PREFETCH)
> return NULL;
>
> + if (dm_bufio_cache_size_latch != 1 && !tried_noio_alloc) {
> + dm_bufio_unlock(c);
> + b = alloc_buffer(c, GFP_NOIO | __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOMEMALLOC | __GFP_NOWARN);
> + dm_bufio_lock(c);
> + if (b)
> + return b;
> + tried_noio_alloc = true;
> + }
> +
> if (!list_empty(&c->reserved_buffers)) {
> b = list_entry(c->reserved_buffers.next,
> struct dm_buffer, lru_list);
I saw a git pull go by today from Mike Snitzer with my version of the
patch in it. I think this is fine because I think my version of the
patch works all right, but I think Mikulas's version of the patch (see
above) is even better.
Since the "git pull" was to Linus and I believe that my version of the
patch is functional (even if it's not optimal), maybe the right thing
to do is to send a new patch with Mikulas's changes atop mine.
Mikulas: does that sound good to you? Do you want to send it?
Thanks!
-Doug
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