xfs: AIL needs asynchronous CIL forcing

The AIL pushing is stalling on log forces when it comes across
pinned items. This is happening on removal workloads where the AIL
is dominated by stale items that are removed from AIL when the
checkpoint that marks the items stale is committed to the journal.
This results is relatively few items in the AIL, but those that are
are often pinned as directories items are being removed from are
still being logged.

As a result, many push cycles through the CIL will first issue a
blocking log force to unpin the items. This can take some time to
complete, with tracing regularly showing push delays of half a
second and sometimes up into the range of several seconds. Sequences
like this aren't uncommon:

....
 399.829437:  xfsaild: last lsn 0x11002dd000 count 101 stuck 101 flushing 0 tout 20
<wanted 20ms, got 270ms delay>
 400.099622:  xfsaild: target 0x11002f3600, prev 0x11002f3600, last lsn 0x0
 400.099623:  xfsaild: first lsn 0x11002f3600
 400.099679:  xfsaild: last lsn 0x1100305000 count 16 stuck 11 flushing 0 tout 50
<wanted 50ms, got 500ms delay>
 400.589348:  xfsaild: target 0x110032e600, prev 0x11002f3600, last lsn 0x0
 400.589349:  xfsaild: first lsn 0x1100305000
 400.589595:  xfsaild: last lsn 0x110032e600 count 156 stuck 101 flushing 30 tout 50
<wanted 50ms, got 460ms delay>
 400.950341:  xfsaild: target 0x1100353000, prev 0x110032e600, last lsn 0x0
 400.950343:  xfsaild: first lsn 0x1100317c00
 400.950436:  xfsaild: last lsn 0x110033d200 count 105 stuck 101 flushing 0 tout 20
<wanted 20ms, got 200ms delay>
 401.142333:  xfsaild: target 0x1100361600, prev 0x1100353000, last lsn 0x0
 401.142334:  xfsaild: first lsn 0x110032e600
 401.142535:  xfsaild: last lsn 0x1100353000 count 122 stuck 101 flushing 8 tout 10
<wanted 10ms, got 10ms delay>
 401.154323:  xfsaild: target 0x1100361600, prev 0x1100361600, last lsn 0x1100353000
 401.154328:  xfsaild: first lsn 0x1100353000
 401.154389:  xfsaild: last lsn 0x1100353000 count 101 stuck 101 flushing 0 tout 20
<wanted 20ms, got 300ms delay>
 401.451525:  xfsaild: target 0x1100361600, prev 0x1100361600, last lsn 0x0
 401.451526:  xfsaild: first lsn 0x1100353000
 401.451804:  xfsaild: last lsn 0x1100377200 count 170 stuck 22 flushing 122 tout 50
<wanted 50ms, got 500ms delay>
 401.933581:  xfsaild: target 0x1100361600, prev 0x1100361600, last lsn 0x0
....

In each of these cases, every AIL pass saw 101 log items stuck on
the AIL (pinned) with very few other items being found. Each pass, a
log force was issued, and delay between last/first is the sleep time
+ the sync log force time.

Some of these 101 items pinned the tail of the log. The tail of the
log does slowly creep forward (first lsn), but the problem is that
the log is actually out of reservation space because it's been
running so many transactions that stale items that never reach the
AIL but consume log space. Hence we have a largely empty AIL, with
long term pins on items that pin the tail of the log that don't get
pushed frequently enough to keep log space available.

The problem is the hundreds of milliseconds that we block in the log
force pushing the CIL out to disk. The AIL should not be stalled
like this - it needs to run and flush items that are at the tail of
the log with minimal latency. What we really need to do is trigger a
log flush, but then not wait for it at all - we've already done our
waiting for stuff to complete when we backed off prior to the log
force being issued.

Even if we remove the XFS_LOG_SYNC from the xfs_log_force() call, we
still do a blocking flush of the CIL and that is what is causing the
issue. Hence we need a new interface for the CIL to trigger an
immediate background push of the CIL to get it moving faster but not
to wait on that to occur. While the CIL is pushing, the AIL can also
be pushing.

We already have an internal interface to do this -
xlog_cil_push_now() - but we need a wrapper for it to be used
externally. xlog_cil_force_seq() can easily be extended to do what
we need as it already implements the synchronous CIL push via
xlog_cil_push_now(). Add the necessary flags and "push current
sequence" semantics to xlog_cil_force_seq() and convert the AIL
pushing to use it.

One of the complexities here is that the CIL push does not guarantee
that the commit record for the CIL checkpoint is written to disk.
The current log force ensures this by submitting the current ACTIVE
iclog that the commit record was written to. We need the CIL to
actually write this commit record to disk for an async push to
ensure that the checkpoint actually makes it to disk and unpins the
pinned items in the checkpoint on completion. Hence we need to pass
down to the CIL push that we are doing an async flush so that it can
switch out the commit_iclog if necessary to get written to disk when
the commit iclog is finally released.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Allison Henderson <allison.henderson@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_trans_ail.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_trans_ail.c
index dbb69b4bf3ed..69aac416e2ce 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_trans_ail.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_trans_ail.c
@@ -17,6 +17,7 @@
 #include "xfs_errortag.h"
 #include "xfs_error.h"
 #include "xfs_log.h"
+#include "xfs_log_priv.h"
 
 #ifdef DEBUG
 /*
@@ -429,8 +430,12 @@ xfsaild_push(
 
 	/*
 	 * If we encountered pinned items or did not finish writing out all
-	 * buffers the last time we ran, force the log first and wait for it
-	 * before pushing again.
+	 * buffers the last time we ran, force a background CIL push to get the
+	 * items unpinned in the near future. We do not wait on the CIL push as
+	 * that could stall us for seconds if there is enough background IO
+	 * load. Stalling for that long when the tail of the log is pinned and
+	 * needs flushing will hard stop the transaction subsystem when log
+	 * space runs out.
 	 */
 	if (ailp->ail_log_flush && ailp->ail_last_pushed_lsn == 0 &&
 	    (!list_empty_careful(&ailp->ail_buf_list) ||
@@ -438,7 +443,7 @@ xfsaild_push(
 		ailp->ail_log_flush = 0;
 
 		XFS_STATS_INC(mp, xs_push_ail_flush);
-		xfs_log_force(mp, XFS_LOG_SYNC);
+		xlog_cil_flush(mp->m_log);
 	}
 
 	spin_lock(&ailp->ail_lock);