When a filesystem is mounted from a loop device, writes are
throttled by balance_dirty_pages() twice: once when writing
to the filesystem and once when the loop_handle_cmd() writes
to the backing file.  This double-throttling can trigger
positive feedback loops that create significant delays.  The
throttling at the lower level is seen by the upper level as
a slow device, so it throttles extra hard.

The PF_LESS_THROTTLE flag was created to handle exactly this
circumstance, though with an NFS filesystem mounted from a
local NFS server.  It reduces the throttling on the lower
layer so that it can proceed largely unthrottled.

To demonstrate this, create a filesystem on a loop device
and write (e.g. with dd) several large files which combine
to consume significantly more than the limit set by
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio or dirty_bytes.  Measure the total
time taken.

When I do this directly on a device (no loop device) the
total time for several runs (mkfs, mount, write 200 files,
umount) is fairly stable: 28-35 seconds.
When I do this over a loop device the times are much worse
and less stable.  52-460 seconds.  Half below 100seconds,
half above.
When I apply this patch, the times become stable again,
though not as fast as the no-loop-back case: 53-72 seconds.

There may be room for further improvement as the total overhead still
seems too high, but this is a big improvement.

Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Ming Lei <tom.leiming@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>