The max-pause limit helps to keep the sleep time inside
balance_dirty_pages() within MAX_PAUSE=200ms. The 200ms max sleep means
per task rate limit of 8pages/200ms=160KB/s when dirty exceeded, which
normally is enough to stop dirtiers from continue pushing the dirty
pages high, unless there are a sufficient large number of slow dirtiers
(eg. 500 tasks doing 160KB/s will still sum up to 80MB/s, exceeding the
write bandwidth of a slow disk and hence accumulating more and more dirty
pages).
The pass-good limit helps to let go of the good bdi's in the presence of
a blocked bdi (ie. NFS server not responding) or slow USB disk which for
some reason build up a large number of initial dirty pages that refuse
to go away anytime soon.
For example, given two bdi's A and B and the initial state
bdi_thresh_A = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2
Then A get blocked, after a dozen seconds
bdi_thresh_A = 0
bdi_thresh_B = dirty_thresh
bdi_dirty_A = dirty_thresh / 2
bdi_dirty_B = dirty_thresh / 2
The (bdi_dirty_B < bdi_thresh_B) test is now useless and the dirty pages
will be effectively throttled by condition (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh).
This has two problems:
(1) we lose the protections for light dirtiers
(2) balance_dirty_pages() effectively becomes IO-less because the
(bdi_nr_reclaimable > bdi_thresh) test won't be true. This is good
for IO, but balance_dirty_pages() loses an important way to break
out of the loop which leads to more spread out throttle delays.
DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA can eliminate the above issues. The only problem is,
DIRTY_PASSGOOD_AREA needs to be defined as 2 to fully cover the above
example while this patch uses the more conservative value 8 so as not to
surprise people with too many dirty pages than expected.
The max-pause limit won't noticeably impact the speed dirty pages are
knocked down when there is a sudden drop of global/bdi dirty thresholds.
Because the heavy dirties will be throttled below 160KB/s which is slow
enough. It does help to avoid long dirty throttle delays and especially
will make light dirtiers more responsive.
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
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