Add /proc entries to give the admin the ability to control the minimum and
maximum number of pdflush threads. This allows finer control of pdflush
on both large and small machines.
The rationale is simply one size does not fit all. Admins on large and/or
small systems may want to tune the min/max pdflush thread count to best
suit their needs. Right now the min/max is hardcoded to 2/8. While
probably a fair estimate for smaller machines, large machines with large
numbers of CPUs and large numbers of filesystems/block devices may benefit
from larger numbers of threads working on different block devices.
Even if the background flushing algorithm is radically changed, it is
still likely that multiple threads will be involved and admins would still
desire finer control on the min/max other than to have to recompile the
kernel.
The patch adds '/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_min' and
'/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_max' with r/w permissions.
The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_min is 1 and the maximum value is
the current value of nr_pdflush_threads_max. This minimum is required
since additional thread creation is performed in a pdflush thread itself.
The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_max is the current value of
nr_pdflush_threads_min and the maximum value can be 1000.
Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt is also updated.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment, fix whitespace, use __read_mostly]
Signed-off-by: Peter W Morreale <pmorreale@novell.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fix a race on creating pdflush threads. Without the patch, it is possible
to create more than MAX_PDFLUSH_THREADS threads, and this has been
observed in practice on IO loaded SMP machines.
The fix involves moving the lock around to protect the check against the
thread count and correctly dealing with thread creation failure.
This fix also _mostly_ repairs a race condition on how quickly the threads
are created. The original intent was to create a pdflush thread (up to
the max allowed) every second. Without this patch is is possible to
create NCPUS pdflush threads concurrently. The 'mostly' caveat is because
an assumption is made that thread creation will be successful. If we fail
to create the thread, the miss is not considered fatal. (we will try
again in 1 second)
Signed-off-by: Peter W Morreale <pmorreale@novell.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Impact: cleanup
(Thanks to Al Viro for reminding me of this, via Ingo)
CPU_MASK_ALL is the (deprecated) "all bits set" cpumask, defined as so:
#define CPU_MASK_ALL (cpumask_t) { { ... } }
Taking the address of such a temporary is questionable at best,
unfortunately 321a8e9d (cpumask: add CPU_MASK_ALL_PTR macro) added
CPU_MASK_ALL_PTR:
#define CPU_MASK_ALL_PTR (&CPU_MASK_ALL)
Which formalizes this practice. One day gcc could bite us over this
usage (though we seem to have gotten away with it so far).
So replace everywhere which used &CPU_MASK_ALL or CPU_MASK_ALL_PTR
with the modern "cpu_all_mask" (a real const struct cpumask *).
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Reported-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com>
Impact: Use new API
Convert kernel mm functions to use struct cpumask.
We skip include/linux/percpu.h and mm/allocpercpu.c, which are in flux.
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
People can use the real name an an index into MAINTAINERS to find the
current email address.
Signed-off-by: Francois Cami <francois.cami@free.fr>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/juhl/trivial: (24 commits)
DOC: A couple corrections and clarifications in USB doc.
Generate a slightly more informative error msg for bad HZ
fix typo "is" -> "if" in Makefile
ext*: spelling fix prefered -> preferred
DOCUMENTATION: Use newer DEFINE_SPINLOCK macro in docs.
KEYS: Fix the comment to match the file name in rxrpc-type.h.
RAID: remove trailing space from printk line
DMA engine: typo fixes
Remove unused MAX_NODES_SHIFT
MAINTAINERS: Clarify access to OCFS2 development mailing list.
V4L: Storage class should be before const qualifier (sn9c102)
V4L: Storage class should be before const qualifier
sonypi: Storage class should be before const qualifier
intel_menlow: Storage class should be before const qualifier
DVB: Storage class should be before const qualifier
arm: Storage class should be before const qualifier
ALSA: Storage class should be before const qualifier
acpi: Storage class should be before const qualifier
firmware_sample_driver.c: fix coding style
MAINTAINERS: Add ati_remote2 driver
...
Fixed up trivial conflicts in firmware_sample_driver.c
These are small cleanups all over the tree.
Trivial style and comment changes to
fs/select.c, kernel/signal.c, kernel/stop_machine.c & mm/pdflush.c
Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
* Modify cpuset_cpus_allowed to return the currently allowed cpuset
via a pointer argument instead of as the function return value.
* Use new set_cpus_allowed_ptr function.
* Cleanup CPU_MASK_ALL and NODE_MASK_ALL uses.
Depends on:
[sched-devel]: sched: add new set_cpus_allowed_ptr function
Signed-off-by: Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Currently, the freezer treats all tasks as freezable, except for the kernel
threads that explicitly set the PF_NOFREEZE flag for themselves. This
approach is problematic, since it requires every kernel thread to either
set PF_NOFREEZE explicitly, or call try_to_freeze(), even if it doesn't
care for the freezing of tasks at all.
It seems better to only require the kernel threads that want to or need to
be frozen to use some freezer-related code and to remove any
freezer-related code from the other (nonfreezable) kernel threads, which is
done in this patch.
The patch causes all kernel threads to be nonfreezable by default (ie. to
have PF_NOFREEZE set by default) and introduces the set_freezable()
function that should be called by the freezable kernel threads in order to
unset PF_NOFREEZE. It also makes all of the currently freezable kernel
threads call set_freezable(), so it shouldn't cause any (intentional)
change of behaviour to appear. Additionally, it updates documentation to
describe the freezing of tasks more accurately.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: build fixes]
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
Acked-by: Nigel Cunningham <nigel@nigel.suspend2.net>
Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Cc: Gautham R Shenoy <ego@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Move process freezing functions from include/linux/sched.h to freezer.h, so
that modifications to the freezer or the kernel configuration don't require
recompiling just about everything.
[akpm@osdl.org: fix ueagle driver]
Signed-off-by: Nigel Cunningham <nigel@suspend2.net>
Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>
Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
pdflush is carefully designed to ensure that all wakeups have some
corresponding work to do - if a woken-up pdflush thread discovers that it
hasn't been given any work to do then this is considered an error.
That all broke when swsusp came along - because a timer-delivered wakeup to a
frozen pdflush thread will just get lost. This causes the pdflush thread to
get lost as well: the writeback timer is supposed to be re-armed by pdflush in
process context, but pdflush doesn't execute the callout which does this.
Fix that up by ignoring the return value from try_to_freeze(): jsut proceed,
see if we have any work pending and only go back to sleep if that is not the
case.
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Add PF_SWAPWRITE to control a processes permission to write to swap.
- Use PF_SWAPWRITE in may_write_to_queue() instead of checking for kswapd
and pdflush
- Set PF_SWAPWRITE flag for kswapd and pdflush
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch keeps pdflush daemons on the same cpuset as their parent, the
kthread daemon.
Some large NUMA configurations put as much as they can of kernel threads
and other classic Unix load in what's called a bootcpuset, keeping the rest
of the system free for dedicated jobs.
This effort is thwarted by pdflush, which dynamically destroys and
recreates pdflush daemons depending on load.
It's easy enough to force the originally created pdflush deamons into the
bootcpuset, at system boottime. But the pdflush threads created later were
allowed to run freely across the system, due to the necessary line in their
startup kthread():
set_cpus_allowed(current, CPU_MASK_ALL);
By simply coding pdflush to start its threads with the cpus_allowed
restrictions of its cpuset (inherited from kthread, its parent) we can
ensure that dynamically created pdflush threads are also kept in the
bootcpuset.
On systems w/o cpusets, or w/o a bootcpuset implementation, the following
will have no affect, leaving pdflush to run on any CPU, as before.
Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
1. Establish a simple API for process freezing defined in linux/include/sched.h:
frozen(process) Check for frozen process
freezing(process) Check if a process is being frozen
freeze(process) Tell a process to freeze (go to refrigerator)
thaw_process(process) Restart process
frozen_process(process) Process is frozen now
2. Remove all references to PF_FREEZE and PF_FROZEN from all
kernel sources except sched.h
3. Fix numerous locations where try_to_freeze is manually done by a driver
4. Remove the argument that is no longer necessary from two function calls.
5. Some whitespace cleanup
6. Clear potential race in refrigerator (provides an open window of PF_FREEZE
cleared before setting PF_FROZEN, recalc_sigpending does not check
PF_FROZEN).
This patch does not address the problem of freeze_processes() violating the rule
that a task may only modify its own flags by setting PF_FREEZE. This is not clean
in an SMP environment. freeze(process) is therefore not SMP safe!
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <christoph@lameter.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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!
Peter W Morreale