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Dave Chinner authored
We've recently seen a workload on XFS filesystems with a repeatable deadlock between background writeback and a multi-process application doing concurrent writes and fsyncs to a small range of a file. range_cyclic writeback Process 1 Process 2 xfs_vm_writepages write_cache_pages writeback_index = 2 cycled = 0 .... find page 2 dirty lock Page 2 ->writepage page 2 writeback page 2 clean page 2 added to bio no more pages write() locks page 1 dirties page 1 locks page 2 dirties page 1 fsync() .... xfs_vm_writepages write_cache_pages start index 0 find page 1 towrite lock Page 1 ->writepage page 1 writeback page 1 clean page 1 added to bio find page 2 towrite lock Page 2 page 2 is writeback <blocks> write() locks page 1 dirties page 1 fsync() .... xfs_vm_writepages write_cache_pages start index 0 !done && !cycled sets index to 0, restarts lookup find page 1 dirty find page 1 towrite lock Page 1 page 1 is writeback <blocks> lock Page 1 <blocks> DEADLOCK because: - process 1 needs page 2 writeback to complete to make enough progress to issue IO pending for page 1 - writeback needs page 1 writeback to complete so process 2 can progress and unlock the page it is blocked on, then it can issue the IO pending for page 2 - process 2 can't make progress until process 1 issues IO for page 1 The underlying cause of the problem here is that range_cyclic writeback is processing pages in descending index order as we hold higher index pages in a structure controlled from above write_cache_pages(). The write_cache_pages() caller needs to be able to submit these pages for IO before write_cache_pages restarts writeback at mapping index 0 to avoid wcp inverting the page lock/writeback wait order. generic_writepages() is not susceptible to this bug as it has no private context held across write_cache_pages() - filesystems using this infrastructure always submit pages in ->writepage immediately and so there is no problem with range_cyclic going back to mapping index 0. However: mpage_writepages() has a private bio context, exofs_writepages() has page_collect fuse_writepages() has fuse_fill_wb_data nfs_writepages() has nfs_pageio_descriptor xfs_vm_writepages() has xfs_writepage_ctx All of these ->writepages implementations can hold pages under writeback in their private structures until write_cache_pages() returns, and hence they are all susceptible to this deadlock. Also worth noting is that ext4 has it's own bastardised version of write_cache_pages() and so it /may/ have an equivalent deadlock. I looked at the code long enough to understand that it has a similar retry loop for range_cyclic writeback reaching the end of the file and then promptly ran away before my eyes bled too much. I'll leave it for the ext4 developers to determine if their code is actually has this deadlock and how to fix it if it has. There's a few ways I can see avoid this deadlock. There's probably more, but these are the first I've though of: 1. get rid of range_cyclic altogether 2. range_cyclic always stops at EOF, and we start again from writeback index 0 on the next call into write_cache_pages() 2a. wcp also returns EAGAIN to ->writepages implementations to indicate range cyclic has hit EOF. writepages implementations can then flush the current context and call wpc again to continue. i.e. lift the retry into the ->writepages implementation 3. range_cyclic uses trylock_page() rather than lock_page(), and it skips pages it can't lock without blocking. It will already do this for pages under writeback, so this seems like a no-brainer 3a. all non-WB_SYNC_ALL writeback uses trylock_page() to avoid blocking as per pages under writeback. I don't think #1 is an option - range_cyclic prevents frequently dirtied lower file offset from starving background writeback of rarely touched higher file offsets. #2 is simple, and I don't think it will have any impact on performance as going back to the start of the file implies an immediate seek. We'll have exactly the same number of seeks if we switch writeback to another inode, and then come back to this one later and restart from index 0. #2a is pretty much "status quo without the deadlock". Moving the retry loop up into the wcp caller means we can issue IO on the pending pages before calling wcp again, and so avoid locking or waiting on pages in the wrong order. I'm not convinced we need to do this given that we get the same thing from #2 on the next writeback call from the writeback infrastructure. #3 is really just a band-aid - it doesn't fix the access/wait inversion problem, just prevents it from becoming a deadlock situation. I'd prefer we fix the inversion, not sweep it under the carpet like this. #3a is really an optimisation that just so happens to include the band-aid fix of #3. So it seems that the simplest way to fix this issue is to implement solution #2 Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181005054526.21507-1-david@fromorbit.com Signed-off-by:Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by:
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