On Fri 17-03-17 07:23:24, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:

On 03/16/2017 04:31 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 04:51:04PM -0500, Goldwyn Rodrigues wrote:

quoted

From: Goldwyn Rodrigues <redacted>

A new flag BIO_NOWAIT is introduced to identify bio's
orignating from iocb with IOCB_NOWAIT. This flag indicates
to return immediately if a request cannot be made instead
of retrying.

So this makes a congested block device run the bio IO completion
callback with an -EAGAIN error present? Are all the filesystem
direct IO submission and completion routines OK with that? i.e. does
such a congestion case cause filesystems to temporarily expose stale
data to unprivileged users when the IO is requeued in this way?

e.g. filesystem does allocation without blocking, submits bio,
device is congested, runs IO completion with error, so nothing
written to allocated blocks, write gets queued, so other read
comes in while the write is queued, reads data from uninitialised
blocks that were allocated during the write....

Seems kinda problematic to me to have a undocumented design
constraint (i.e a landmine) where we submit the AIO only to have it
error out and then expect the filesystem to do something special and
different /without blocking/ on EAGAIN.

If the filesystems has to perform block allocation, we would return
-EAGAIN early enough. However, I agree there is a problem, since not all
filesystems know this. I worked on only three of them.

So Dave has a good point about the missing documentation explaining the
expectation from the filesystem. Other than that the filesystem is
responsible for determining in its direct IO submission routine whether it
can deal with NOWAIT direct IO without blocking (including backing out of
block layer refuses to do the IO) and if not, just return with EAGAIN right
away.

Probably we should also have a feature flag in filesystem_type telling
whether a particular filesystem knows about NOWAIT direct IO at all so that
we don't have to add stub to each and every filesystem supporting direct IO
that returns EAGAIN when NOWAIT is set (OTOH adding that stub won't be that
hard either since there are not *that* many filesystems supporting direct
IO). But one or the other has to be done.

quoted

Why isn't the congestion check at a higher layer like we do for page
cache readahead? i.e. using the bdi*congested() API at the time we
are doing all the other filesystem blocking checks.

Yes, that may work better. We will have to call bdi_read_congested() on
a write path. (will have to comment that part of the code). Would it
encompass all possible waits in the block layer?

Congestion mechanism is not really reliable. The bdi can show the device is
not congested but block layer will still block you waiting for some
resource. And for some of the stuff like tag allocation you cannot really
do a reliable check in advance so I don't think congestion checks are
really a viable alternative.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara [off-list ref]
SUSE Labs, CR