Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug()

From	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug()
Date	2015-09-18 17:40 +0200
Message-ID	<qa5Vx-6Jf-59@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References	(7 earlier) <q9T7X-55L-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <q9WIy-1Wn-11@gated-at.bofh.it> <q9X1T-2y9-3@gated-at.bofh.it> <qa3K2-3Fh-21@gated-at.bofh.it> <qa4PM-5bi-33@gated-at.bofh.it>
Organization	linux.* mail to news gateway

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On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 7:23 AM, Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com> wrote:
>
> It makes no sense for preemption schedule to NOT unplug, the fact that it
> doesn't is news to me as well. It was never the intent of the
> unplug-on-schedule to NOT unplug for certain schedule out events, that seems
> like very odd behavior.

Actually, even a *full* schedule doesn't unplug, unless the process is
going to sleep. See sched_submit_work(), which  will only call the
unplugging if the process is actually going to sleep (ok, so it's a
bit subtle if you don't know the state rules, but it's the
"!tsk->state" check there)

So preemption and cond_resched() isn't _that_ odd. We've basically
treated a non-sleeping schedule as a no-op for the task work.

The thinking was probably that it might be better to delay starting
the IO in case we get scheduled back quickly, and we're obviously not
actually _sleeping_, so it's likely not too bad.

Now, that's probably bogus, and I think that we should perhaps just
make the rule be that "if we actually switch to another task, we run
blk_schedule_flush_plug()".

But it should be noted that that really *does* introduce a lot of new
potential races. Traditionally, our block layer plugging has been
entirely thread-synchronous, and would never happen asynchronously.
But with preemption, that "switch to another thread" really *does*
happen asynchronously.

So making things always happen on task switch is actually fairly
dangerous, and potentially adds the need for much more synchronization
for the IO submission.

What we possibly *could* make the scheduler rule be:

 - if it's not an actual PREEMPT_ACTIVE (ie in a random place)

 - _and_ we actually switch to another thread

 - _then_ do the whole blk_schedule_flush_plug(tsk) thing.

adding some scheduler people to the explicit cc list.

That said, the "cond_resched[_lock]()" functions currently always set
PREEMPT_ACTIVE (indirectly - they use preempt_schedule_common()), so
even though those are synchronous, right now they *look* asynchronous
to the scheduler, so we'd still have to sort that out.

Ingo/Peter/Frederic? Comments?

                        Linus
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Thread

[PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-11 21:40 +0200
  Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-11 22:10 +0200
    Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-11 22:40 +0200
      Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Josef Bacik <jbacik@fb.com> - 2015-09-11 22:50 +0200
        Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-11 23:10 +0200
          Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-12 00:10 +0200
            Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-12 01:20 +0200
              Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-12 01:40 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-12 03:00 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-12 04:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-12 04:30 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-13 01:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-13 01:30 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-13 01:50 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-13 15:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-14 01:00 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-14 01:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-14 22:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> - 2015-09-16 22:00 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-16 22:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-17 00:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-17 02:40 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-17 03:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-17 04:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-17 21:40 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-18 00:50 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-18 01:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-18 02:00 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-18 02:40 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-18 04:00 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-18 07:50 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-18 08:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-18 08:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com> - 2015-09-18 16:30 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-18 15:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com> - 2015-09-18 16:30 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-18 17:40 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> - 2015-09-18 18:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> - 2015-09-18 18:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-18 18:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-19 01:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> - 2015-09-21 11:30 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during  blk_finish_plug() Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-21 22:30 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-18 01:10 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-18 01:20 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-17 05:50 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> - 2015-09-17 06:40 +0200
                Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-17 14:20 +0200
          Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> - 2015-09-12 01:10 +0200
            Re: [PATCH] fs-writeback: drop wb->list_lock during blk_finish_plug() Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-09-12 01:20 +0200

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