Re: [PATCH 06/13] blkcg: add generic throttling mechanism

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Tue Jun 05 2018 - 16:46:06 EST


On Tue, Jun 05, 2018 at 09:29:41AM -0400, Josef Bacik wrote:
> From: Josef Bacik <jbacik@xxxxxx>
>
> Since IO can be issued from literally anywhere it's almost impossible to
> do throttling without having some sort of adverse effect somewhere else
> in the system because of locking or other dependencies. The best way to
> solve this is to do the throttling when we know we aren't holding any
> other kernel resources. Do this by tracking throttling in a per-blkg
> basis, and if we require throttling flag the task that it needs to check
> before it returns to user space and possibly sleep there.
>
> This is to address the case where a process is doing work that is
> generating IO that can't be throttled, whether that is directly with a
> lot of REQ_META IO, or indirectly by allocating so much memory that it
> is swamping the disk with REQ_SWAP. We can't use task_add_work as we
> don't want to induce a memory allocation in the IO path, so simply
> saving the request queue in the task and flagging it to do the
> notify_resume thing achieves the same result without the overhead of a
> memory allocation.
>
> Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <jbacik@xxxxxx>

Acked-by: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx>

--
tejun