Re: Too many I/O controller patches

On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:20:18 -0700
Dave Hansen [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 11:28 +0200, Andrea Righi wrote:

quoted

quoted

Buffered write I/O is also related with cache system.
We must consider this problem as I/O control.

Agree. At least, maybe we should consider if an IO controller could be
a valid solution also for these problems.

Isn't this one of the core points that we keep going back and forth
over?  It seems like people are arguing in circles over this:

Do we:
	1. control potential memory usage by throttling I/O
or
	2. Throttle I/O when memory is full

I might lean toward (1) if we didn't already have a memory controller.
But, we have one, and it works.  Also, we *already* do (2) in the
kernel, so it would seem to graft well onto existing mechanisms that we
have.

I/O controllers should not worry about memory.  

I agree here ;)

They're going to have a hard enough time getting the I/O part right. :)

memcg have more problems now ;( 

Only a difficult thing to limit dirty-ratio in memcg is how-to-count dirty
pages. If I/O controller's hook helps, it's good.

My small concern is "What happens if we throttole I/O bandwidth too small
under some memcg." In such cgroup, we may see more OOMs because I/O will
not finish in time.
A system admin have to find some way to avoid this.

But please do I/O control first. Dirty-page control is related but different
layer's problem, I think.

Thanks,
-Kame

Or, am I over-simplifying this?

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