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Josef Bacik e19eb11f4f btrfs: only let one thread pre-flush delayed refs in commit
I've been running a stress test that runs 20 workers in their own
subvolume, which are running an fsstress instance with 4 threads per
worker, which is 80 total fsstress threads.  In addition to this I'm
running balance in the background as well as creating and deleting
snapshots.  This test takes around 12 hours to run normally, going
slower and slower as the test goes on.

The reason for this is because fsstress is running fsync sometimes, and
because we're messing with block groups we often fall through to
btrfs_commit_transaction, so will often have 20-30 threads all calling
btrfs_commit_transaction at the same time.

These all get stuck contending on the extent tree while they try to run
delayed refs during the initial part of the commit.

This is suboptimal, really because the extent tree is a single point of
failure we only want one thread acting on that tree at once to reduce
lock contention.

Fix this by making the flushing mechanism a bit operation, to make it
easy to use test_and_set_bit() in order to make sure only one task does
this initial flush.

Once we're into the transaction commit we only have one thread doing
delayed ref running, it's just this initial pre-flush that is
problematic.  With this patch my stress test takes around 90 minutes to
run, instead of 12 hours.

The memory barrier is not necessary for the flushing bit as it's
ordered, unlike plain int. The transaction state accessed in
btrfs_should_end_transaction could be affected by that too as it's not
always used under transaction lock. Upon Nikolay's analysis in [1]
it's not necessary:

  In should_end_transaction it's read without holding any locks. (U)

  It's modified in btrfs_cleanup_transaction without holding the
  fs_info->trans_lock (U), but the STATE_ERROR flag is going to be set.

  set in cleanup_transaction under fs_info->trans_lock (L)
  set in btrfs_commit_trans to COMMIT_START under fs_info->trans_lock.(L)
  set in btrfs_commit_trans to COMMIT_DOING under fs_info->trans_lock.(L)
  set in btrfs_commit_trans to COMMIT_UNBLOCK under
  fs_info->trans_lock.(L)

  set in btrfs_commit_trans to COMMIT_COMPLETED without locks but at this
  point the transaction is finished and fs_info->running_trans is NULL (U
  but irrelevant).

  So by the looks of it we can have a concurrent READ race with a WRITE,
  due to reads not taking a lock. In this case what we want to ensure is
  we either see new or old state. I consulted with Will Deacon and he said
  that in such a case we'd want to annotate the accesses to ->state with
  (READ|WRITE)_ONCE so as to avoid a theoretical tear, in this case I
  don't think this could happen but I imagine at some point KCSAN would
  flag such an access as racy (which it is).

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/e1fd5cc1-0f28-f670-69f4-e9958b4964e6@suse.com

Reviewed-by: Nikolay Borisov <nborisov@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
[ add comments regarding memory barrier ]
Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
2021-02-08 22:58:56 +01:00
arch - For syscall user dispatch, separate ptctl operation from syscall 2021-02-07 10:16:24 -08:00
block block-5.11-2021-02-05 2021-02-06 14:40:27 -08:00
certs .gitignore: add SPDX License Identifier 2020-03-25 11:50:48 +01:00
crypto X.509: Fix crash caused by NULL pointer 2021-01-20 11:33:51 -08:00
Documentation - For syscall user dispatch, separate ptctl operation from syscall 2021-02-07 10:16:24 -08:00
drivers libnvdimm for 5.11-rc7 2021-02-07 10:45:26 -08:00
fs btrfs: only let one thread pre-flush delayed refs in commit 2021-02-08 22:58:56 +01:00
include lib/zstd: convert constants to defines 2021-02-08 22:58:55 +01:00
init init/gcov: allow CONFIG_CONSTRUCTORS on UML to fix module gcov 2021-02-05 11:03:47 -08:00
ipc Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew) 2020-12-15 12:53:37 -08:00
kernel tracing: Fix output of top level event "enable" file 2021-02-08 11:32:39 -08:00
lib - Revert an attempt to not spread IRQ threads on isolated CPUs which has 2021-02-07 10:03:43 -08:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Add the CC-BY-4.0 license 2020-12-08 10:33:27 -07:00
mm mm: hugetlb: fix missing put_page in gather_surplus_pages() 2021-02-05 11:03:47 -08:00
net Fixes: 2021-02-05 10:11:14 -08:00
samples ARM: SoC drivers for v5.11 2020-12-16 16:38:41 -08:00
scripts kallsyms: fix nonconverging kallsyms table with lld 2021-02-05 17:53:28 +09:00
security cap: fix conversions on getxattr 2021-01-28 10:22:48 +01:00
sound ALSA: hda/via: Apply the workaround generically for Clevo machines 2021-01-26 18:05:03 +01:00
tools libnvdimm for 5.11-rc7 2021-02-07 10:45:26 -08:00
usr Merge branch 'work.fdpic' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2020-08-07 13:29:39 -07:00
virt KVM/arm64 fixes for 5.11, take #2 2021-01-25 18:52:01 -05:00
.clang-format clang-format: Update with the latest for_each macro list 2021-01-29 15:00:23 +01:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore Opt out of scripts/get_maintainer.pl 2019-05-16 10:53:40 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: use 'dts' diff driver for dts files 2019-12-04 19:44:11 -08:00
.gitignore .gitignore: docs: ignore sphinx_*/ directories 2020-09-10 10:44:31 -06:00
.mailmap block-5.11-2021-02-05 2021-02-06 14:40:27 -08:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: dccp: move Gerrit Renker to CREDITS 2021-01-14 10:53:49 -08:00
Kbuild kbuild: rename hostprogs-y/always to hostprogs/always-y 2020-02-04 01:53:07 +09:00
Kconfig kbuild: ensure full rebuild when the compiler is updated 2020-05-12 13:28:33 +09:00
MAINTAINERS MAINTAINERS/.mailmap: use my @kernel.org address 2021-02-05 11:03:47 -08:00
Makefile Linux 5.11-rc7 2021-02-07 13:57:38 -08:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.