linux.git/mm/page-writeback.c, branch v5.10

mm: fix VM_BUG_ON(PageTail) and BUG_ON(PageWriteback)

2020-11-24T23:23:19+00:00

Twice now, when exercising ext4 looped on shmem huge pages, I have crashed
on the PF_ONLY_HEAD check inside PageWaiters(): ext4_finish_bio() calling
end_page_writeback() calling wake_up_page() on tail of a shmem huge page,
no longer an ext4 page at all.

The problem is that PageWriteback is not accompanied by a page reference
(as the NOTE at the end of test_clear_page_writeback() acknowledges): as
soon as TestClearPageWriteback has been done, that page could be removed
from page cache, freed, and reused for something else by the time that
wake_up_page() is reached.

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200827122019.GC14765@casper.infradead.org/
Matthew Wilcox suggested avoiding or weakening the PageWaiters() tail
check; but I'm paranoid about even looking at an unreferenced struct page,
lest its memory might itself have already been reused or hotremoved (and
wake_up_page_bit() may modify that memory with its ClearPageWaiters()).

Then on crashing a second time, realized there's a stronger reason against
that approach.  If my testing just occasionally crashes on that check,
when the page is reused for part of a compound page, wouldn't it be much
more common for the page to get reused as an order-0 page before reaching
wake_up_page()?  And on rare occasions, might that reused page already be
marked PageWriteback by its new user, and already be waited upon?  What
would that look like?

It would look like BUG_ON(PageWriteback) after wait_on_page_writeback()
in write_cache_pages() (though I have never seen that crash myself).

Matthew Wilcox explaining this to himself:
 "page is allocated, added to page cache, dirtied, writeback starts,

  --- thread A ---
  filesystem calls end_page_writeback()
        test_clear_page_writeback()
  --- context switch to thread B ---
  truncate_inode_pages_range() finds the page, it doesn't have writeback set,
  we delete it from the page cache.  Page gets reallocated, dirtied, writeback
  starts again.  Then we call write_cache_pages(), see
  PageWriteback() set, call wait_on_page_writeback()
  --- context switch back to thread A ---
  wake_up_page(page, PG_writeback);
  ... thread B is woken, but because the wakeup was for the old use of
  the page, PageWriteback is still set.

  Devious"

And prior to 2a9127fcf229 ("mm: rewrite wait_on_page_bit_common() logic")
this would have been much less likely: before that, wake_page_function()'s
non-exclusive case would stop walking and not wake if it found Writeback
already set again; whereas now the non-exclusive case proceeds to wake.

I have not thought of a fix that does not add a little overhead: the
simplest fix is for end_page_writeback() to get_page() before calling
test_clear_page_writeback(), then put_page() after wake_up_page().

Was there a chance of missed wakeups before, since a page freed before
reaching wake_up_page() would have PageWaiters cleared?  I think not,
because each waiter does hold a reference on the page.  This bug comes
when the old use of the page, the one we do TestClearPageWriteback on,
had *no* waiters, so no additional page reference beyond the page cache
(and whoever racily freed it).  The reuse of the page has a waiter
holding a reference, and its own PageWriteback set; but the belated
wake_up_page() has woken the reuse to hit that BUG_ON(PageWriteback).

Reported-by: syzbot+3622cea378100f45d59f@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Reported-by: Qian Cai 
Fixes: 2a9127fcf229 ("mm: rewrite wait_on_page_bit_common() logic")
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v5.8+
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/page-writeback: support tail pages in wait_for_stable_page

2020-10-16T18:11:15+00:00

page->mapping is undefined for tail pages, so operate exclusively on the
head page.

Signed-off-by: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Reviewed-by: SeongJae Park 
Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov 
Cc: Huang Ying 
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200908195539.25896-11-willy@infradead.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

bdi: replace BDI_CAP_NO_{WRITEBACK,ACCT_DIRTY} with a single flag

2020-09-24T19:43:39+00:00

Replace the two negative flags that are always used together with a
single positive flag that indicates the writeback capability instead
of two related non-capabilities.  Also remove the pointless wrappers
to just check the flag.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Reviewed-by: Johannes Thumshirn 
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

bdi: invert BDI_CAP_NO_ACCT_WB

2020-09-24T19:43:39+00:00

Replace BDI_CAP_NO_ACCT_WB with a positive BDI_CAP_WRITEBACK_ACCT to
make the checks more obvious.  Also remove the pointless
bdi_cap_account_writeback wrapper that just obsfucates the check.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Reviewed-by: Johannes Thumshirn 
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

bdi: replace BDI_CAP_STABLE_WRITES with a queue and a sb flag

2020-09-24T19:43:39+00:00

The BDI_CAP_STABLE_WRITES is one of the few bits of information in the
backing_dev_info shared between the block drivers and the writeback code.
To help untangling the dependency replace it with a queue flag and a
superblock flag derived from it.  This also helps with the case of e.g.
a file system requiring stable writes due to its own checksumming, but
not forcing it on other users of the block device like the swap code.

One downside is that we an't support the stable_pages_required bdi
attribute in sysfs anymore.  It is replaced with a queue attribute which
also is writable for easier testing.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Reviewed-by: Johannes Thumshirn 
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

mm: remove vm_total_pages

2020-08-07T18:33:28+00:00

The global variable "vm_total_pages" is a relic from older days.  There is
only a single user that reads the variable - build_all_zonelists() - and
the first thing it does is update it.

Use a local variable in build_all_zonelists() instead and remove the
global variable.

Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Reviewed-by: Wei Yang 
Reviewed-by: Pankaj Gupta 
Reviewed-by: Mike Rapoport 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Huang Ying 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200619132410.23859-2-david@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/page-writeback: fix a typo in comment "effictive"->"effective"

2020-06-05T02:06:24+00:00

There is a typo in comment, fix it.

Signed-off-by: Ethon Paul 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200411003513.14613-1-ethp@qq.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next

2020-06-03T23:27:18+00:00

Pull networking updates from David Miller:

 1) Allow setting bluetooth L2CAP modes via socket option, from Luiz
    Augusto von Dentz.

 2) Add GSO partial support to igc, from Sasha Neftin.

 3) Several cleanups and improvements to r8169 from Heiner Kallweit.

 4) Add IF_OPER_TESTING link state and use it when ethtool triggers a
    device self-test. From Andrew Lunn.

 5) Start moving away from custom driver versions, use the globally
    defined kernel version instead, from Leon Romanovsky.

 6) Support GRO vis gro_cells in DSA layer, from Alexander Lobakin.

 7) Allow hard IRQ deferral during NAPI, from Eric Dumazet.

 8) Add sriov and vf support to hinic, from Luo bin.

 9) Support Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP) in the bridging code, from
    Horatiu Vultur.

10) Support netmap in the nft_nat code, from Pablo Neira Ayuso.

11) Allow UDPv6 encapsulation of ESP in the ipsec code, from Sabrina
    Dubroca. Also add ipv6 support for espintcp.

12) Lots of ReST conversions of the networking documentation, from Mauro
    Carvalho Chehab.

13) Support configuration of ethtool rxnfc flows in bcmgenet driver,
    from Doug Berger.

14) Allow to dump cgroup id and filter by it in inet_diag code, from
    Dmitry Yakunin.

15) Add infrastructure to export netlink attribute policies to
    userspace, from Johannes Berg.

16) Several optimizations to sch_fq scheduler, from Eric Dumazet.

17) Fallback to the default qdisc if qdisc init fails because otherwise
    a packet scheduler init failure will make a device inoperative. From
    Jesper Dangaard Brouer.

18) Several RISCV bpf jit optimizations, from Luke Nelson.

19) Correct the return type of the ->ndo_start_xmit() method in several
    drivers, it's netdev_tx_t but many drivers were using
    'int'. From Yunjian Wang.

20) Add an ethtool interface for PHY master/slave config, from Oleksij
    Rempel.

21) Add BPF iterators, from Yonghang Song.

22) Add cable test infrastructure, including ethool interfaces, from
    Andrew Lunn. Marvell PHY driver is the first to support this
    facility.

23) Remove zero-length arrays all over, from Gustavo A. R. Silva.

24) Calculate and maintain an explicit frame size in XDP, from Jesper
    Dangaard Brouer.

25) Add CAP_BPF, from Alexei Starovoitov.

26) Support terse dumps in the packet scheduler, from Vlad Buslov.

27) Support XDP_TX bulking in dpaa2 driver, from Ioana Ciornei.

28) Add devm_register_netdev(), from Bartosz Golaszewski.

29) Minimize qdisc resets, from Cong Wang.

30) Get rid of kernel_getsockopt and kernel_setsockopt in order to
    eliminate set_fs/get_fs calls. From Christoph Hellwig.

* git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next: (2517 commits)
  selftests: net: ip_defrag: ignore EPERM
  net_failover: fixed rollback in net_failover_open()
  Revert "tipc: Fix potential tipc_aead refcnt leak in tipc_crypto_rcv"
  Revert "tipc: Fix potential tipc_node refcnt leak in tipc_rcv"
  vmxnet3: allow rx flow hash ops only when rss is enabled
  hinic: add set_channels ethtool_ops support
  selftests/bpf: Add a default $(CXX) value
  tools/bpf: Don't use $(COMPILE.c)
  bpf, selftests: Use bpf_probe_read_kernel
  s390/bpf: Use bcr 0,%0 as tail call nop filler
  s390/bpf: Maintain 8-byte stack alignment
  selftests/bpf: Fix verifier test
  selftests/bpf: Fix sample_cnt shared between two threads
  bpf, selftests: Adapt cls_redirect to call csum_level helper
  bpf: Add csum_level helper for fixing up csum levels
  bpf: Fix up bpf_skb_adjust_room helper's skb csum setting
  sfc: add missing annotation for efx_ef10_try_update_nic_stats_vf()
  crypto/chtls: IPv6 support for inline TLS
  Crypto/chcr: Fixes a coccinile check error
  Crypto/chcr: Fixes compilations warnings
  ...

mm/writeback: discard NR_UNSTABLE_NFS, use NR_WRITEBACK instead

2020-06-02T17:59:08+00:00

After an NFS page has been written it is considered "unstable" until a
COMMIT request succeeds.  If the COMMIT fails, the page will be
re-written.

These "unstable" pages are currently accounted as "reclaimable", either
in WB_RECLAIMABLE, or in NR_UNSTABLE_NFS which is included in a
'reclaimable' count.  This might have made sense when sending the COMMIT
required a separate action by the VFS/MM (e.g.  releasepage() used to
send a COMMIT).  However now that all writes generated by ->writepages()
will automatically be followed by a COMMIT (since commit 919e3bd9a875
("NFS: Ensure we commit after writeback is complete")) it makes more
sense to treat them as writeback pages.

So this patch removes NR_UNSTABLE_NFS and accounts unstable pages in
NR_WRITEBACK and WB_WRITEBACK.

A particular effect of this change is that when
wb_check_background_flush() calls wb_over_bg_threshold(), the latter
will report 'true' a lot less often as the 'unstable' pages are no
longer considered 'dirty' (as there is nothing that writeback can do
about them anyway).

Currently wb_check_background_flush() will trigger writeback to NFS even
when there are relatively few dirty pages (if there are lots of unstable
pages), this can result in small writes going to the server (10s of
Kilobytes rather than a Megabyte) which hurts throughput.  With this
patch, there are fewer writes which are each larger on average.

Where the NR_UNSTABLE_NFS count was included in statistics
virtual-files, the entry is retained, but the value is hard-coded as
zero.  static trace points and warning printks which mentioned this
counter no longer report it.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: re-layout comment]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix printk warning]
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Acked-by: Trond Myklebust 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 	[mm]
Cc: Christoph Hellwig 
Cc: Chuck Lever 
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/87d06j7gqa.fsf@notabene.neil.brown.name
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/writeback: replace PF_LESS_THROTTLE with PF_LOCAL_THROTTLE

2020-06-02T17:59:08+00:00

PF_LESS_THROTTLE exists for loop-back nfsd (and a similar need in the
loop block driver and callers of prctl(PR_SET_IO_FLUSHER)), where a
daemon needs to write to one bdi (the final bdi) in order to free up
writes queued to another bdi (the client bdi).

The daemon sets PF_LESS_THROTTLE and gets a larger allowance of dirty
pages, so that it can still dirty pages after other processses have been
throttled.  The purpose of this is to avoid deadlock that happen when
the PF_LESS_THROTTLE process must write for any dirty pages to be freed,
but it is being thottled and cannot write.

This approach was designed when all threads were blocked equally,
independently on which device they were writing to, or how fast it was.
Since that time the writeback algorithm has changed substantially with
different threads getting different allowances based on non-trivial
heuristics.  This means the simple "add 25%" heuristic is no longer
reliable.

The important issue is not that the daemon needs a *larger* dirty page
allowance, but that it needs a *private* dirty page allowance, so that
dirty pages for the "client" bdi that it is helping to clear (the bdi
for an NFS filesystem or loop block device etc) do not affect the
throttling of the daemon writing to the "final" bdi.

This patch changes the heuristic so that the task is not throttled when
the bdi it is writing to has a dirty page count below below (or equal
to) the free-run threshold for that bdi.  This ensures it will always be
able to have some pages in flight, and so will not deadlock.

In a steady-state, it is expected that PF_LOCAL_THROTTLE tasks might
still be throttled by global threshold, but that is acceptable as it is
only the deadlock state that is interesting for this flag.

This approach of "only throttle when target bdi is busy" is consistent
with the other use of PF_LESS_THROTTLE in current_may_throttle(), were
it causes attention to be focussed only on the target bdi.

So this patch
 - renames PF_LESS_THROTTLE to PF_LOCAL_THROTTLE,
 - removes the 25% bonus that that flag gives, and
 - If PF_LOCAL_THROTTLE is set, don't delay at all unless the
   global and the local free-run thresholds are exceeded.

Note that previously realtime threads were treated the same as
PF_LESS_THROTTLE threads.  This patch does *not* change the behvaiour
for real-time threads, so it is now different from the behaviour of nfsd
and loop tasks.  I don't know what is wanted for realtime.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding style fixes]
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Acked-by: Chuck Lever 	[nfsd]
Cc: Christoph Hellwig 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Trond Myklebust 
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/87ftbf7gs3.fsf@notabene.neil.brown.name
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds