When we have a couple of hundred transactions on the fly at once, they all
typically modify the on disk superblock in some way.
create/unclink/mkdir/rmdir modify inode counts, allocation/freeing modify
free block counts.
When these counts are modified in a transaction, they must eventually lock
the superblock buffer and apply the mods. The buffer then remains locked
until the transaction is committed into the incore log buffer. The result
of this is that with enough transactions on the fly the incore superblock
buffer becomes a bottleneck.
The result of contention on the incore superblock buffer is that
transaction rates fall - the more pressure that is put on the superblock
buffer, the slower things go.
The key to removing the contention is to not require the superblock fields
in question to be locked. We do that by not marking the superblock dirty
in the transaction. IOWs, we modify the incore superblock but do not
modify the cached superblock buffer. In short, we do not log superblock
modifications to critical fields in the superblock on every transaction.
In fact we only do it just before we write the superblock to disk every
sync period or just before unmount.
This creates an interesting problem - if we don't log or write out the
fields in every transaction, then how do the values get recovered after a
crash? the answer is simple - we keep enough duplicate, logged information
in other structures that we can reconstruct the correct count after log
recovery has been performed.
It is the AGF and AGI structures that contain the duplicate information;
after recovery, we walk every AGI and AGF and sum their individual
counters to get the correct value, and we do a transaction into the log to
correct them. An optimisation of this is that if we have a clean unmount
record, we know the value in the superblock is correct, so we can avoid
the summation walk under normal conditions and so mount/recovery times do
not change under normal operation.
One wrinkle that was discovered during development was that the blocks
used in the freespace btrees are never accounted for in the AGF counters.
This was once a valid optimisation to make; when the filesystem is full,
the free space btrees are empty and consume no space. Hence when it
matters, the "accounting" is correct. But that means the when we do the
AGF summations, we would not have a correct count and xfs_check would
complain. Hence a new counter was added to track the number of blocks used
by the free space btrees. This is an *on-disk format change*.
As a result of this, lazy superblock counters are a mkfs option and at the
moment on linux there is no way to convert an old filesystem. This is
possible - xfs_db can be used to twiddle the right bits and then
xfs_repair will do the format conversion for you. Similarly, you can
convert backwards as well. At some point we'll add functionality to
xfs_admin to do the bit twiddling easily....
SGI-PV: 964999
SGI-Modid: xfs-linux-melb:xfs-kern:28652a
Signed-off-by: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Tim Shimmin <tes@sgi.com>
The fix for recent ENOSPC deadlocks introduced certain limitations on
allocations. The fix could cause xfssyncd to loop endlessly if we did not
leave some space free for the allocator to work correctly. Basically, we
needed to ensure that we had at least 4 blocks free for an AG free list
and a block for the inode bmap btree at all times.
However, this did not take into account the fact that each AG has a free
list that needs 4 blocks. Hence any filesystem with more than one AG could
cause oversubscription of free space and make xfssyncd spin forever trying
to allocate space needed for AG freelists that was not available in the
AG.
The following patch reserves space for the free lists in all AGs plus the
inode bmap btree which prevents oversubscription. It also prevents those
blocks from being reported as free space (as they can never be used) and
makes the SMP in-core superblock accounting code and the reserved block
ioctl respect this requirement.
SGI-PV: 955674
SGI-Modid: xfs-linux-melb:xfs-kern:26894a
Signed-off-by: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: David Chatterton <chatz@sgi.com>
transaction within each such operation may involve multiple locking of AGF
buffer. While the freeing extent function has sorted the extents based on
AGF number before entering into transaction, however, when the file system
space is very limited, the allocation of space would try every AGF to get
space allocated, this could potentially cause out-of-order locking, thus
deadlock could happen. This fix mitigates the scarce space for allocation
by setting aside a few blocks without reservation, and avoid deadlock by
maintaining ascending order of AGF locking.
SGI-PV: 947395
SGI-Modid: xfs-linux-melb:xfs-kern:210801a
Signed-off-by: Yingping Lu <yingping@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Nathan Scott <nathans@sgi.com>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
David Chinner
Yingping Lu
Nathan Scott
Linus Torvalds