Document the slow work thread pool.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>
Make the slow work pool configurable through /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work.
(*) /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work/min-threads
The minimum number of threads that should be in the pool as long as it is
in use. This may be anywhere between 2 and max-threads.
(*) /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work/max-threads
The maximum number of threads that should in the pool. This may be
anywhere between min-threads and 255 or NR_CPUS * 2, whichever is greater.
(*) /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work/vslow-percentage
The percentage of active threads in the pool that may be used to execute
very slow work items. This may be between 1 and 99. The resultant number
is bounded to between 1 and one fewer than the number of active threads.
This ensures there is always at least one thread that can process very
slow work items, and always at least one thread that won't.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>
Make the slow-work thread pool actually dynamic in the number of threads it
contains. With this patch, it will both create additional threads when it has
extra work to do, and cull excess threads that aren't doing anything.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>
Create a dynamically sized pool of threads for doing very slow work items, such
as invoking mkdir() or rmdir() - things that may take a long time and may
sleep, holding mutexes/semaphores and hogging a thread, and are thus unsuitable
for workqueues.
The number of threads is always at least a settable minimum, but more are
started when there's more work to do, up to a limit. Because of the nature of
the load, it's not suitable for a 1-thread-per-CPU type pool. A system with
one CPU may well want several threads.
This is used by FS-Cache to do slow caching operations in the background, such
as looking up, creating or deleting cache objects.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Acked-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Tested-by: Daire Byrne <Daire.Byrne@framestore.com>
David Howells