writeback: control dirty pause time

The dirty pause time shall ultimately be controlled by adjusting
nr_dirtied_pause, since there is relationship

	pause = pages_dirtied / task_ratelimit

Assuming

	pages_dirtied ~= nr_dirtied_pause
	task_ratelimit ~= dirty_ratelimit

We get

	nr_dirtied_pause ~= dirty_ratelimit * desired_pause

Here dirty_ratelimit is preferred over task_ratelimit because it's
more stable.

It's also important to limit possible large transitional errors:

- bw is changing quickly
- pages_dirtied << nr_dirtied_pause on entering dirty exceeded area
- pages_dirtied >> nr_dirtied_pause on btrfs (to be improved by a
  separate fix, but still expect non-trivial errors)

So we end up using the above formula inside clamp_val().

The best test case for this code is to run 100 "dd bs=4M" tasks on
btrfs and check its pause time distribution.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>

diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
index cc351e6..6a8bb69 100644 (file)
--- a/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ b/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -1086,6 +1086,10 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct address_space *mapping,
                task_ratelimit = (u64)dirty_ratelimit *
                                        pos_ratio >> RATELIMIT_CALC_SHIFT;
                pause = (HZ * pages_dirtied) / (task_ratelimit | 1);
+               if (unlikely(pause <= 0)) {
+                       pause = 1; /* avoid resetting nr_dirtied_pause below */
+                       break;
+               }
                pause = min(pause, max_pause);
 
 pause:
@@ -1107,7 +1111,21 @@ pause:
                bdi->dirty_exceeded = 0;
 
        current->nr_dirtied = 0;
-       current->nr_dirtied_pause = dirty_poll_interval(nr_dirty, dirty_thresh);
+       if (pause == 0) { /* in freerun area */
+               current->nr_dirtied_pause =
+                               dirty_poll_interval(nr_dirty, dirty_thresh);
+       } else if (pause <= max_pause / 4 &&
+                  pages_dirtied >= current->nr_dirtied_pause) {
+               current->nr_dirtied_pause = clamp_val(
+                                       dirty_ratelimit * (max_pause / 2) / HZ,
+                                       pages_dirtied + pages_dirtied / 8,
+                                       pages_dirtied * 4);
+       } else if (pause >= max_pause) {
+               current->nr_dirtied_pause = 1 | clamp_val(
+                                       dirty_ratelimit * (max_pause / 2) / HZ,
+                                       pages_dirtied / 4,
+                                       pages_dirtied - pages_dirtied / 8);
+       }
 
        if (writeback_in_progress(bdi))
                return;