[PATCH 3/3] writeback, blkio: add documentation for cgroup writeback support

[Tejun Heo]

Update Documentation/cgroups/blkio-controller.txt to reflect the
recently added cgroup writeback support.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Li Zefan <lizefan@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: cgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-fsdevel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
---
 Documentation/cgroups/blkio-controller.txt | 83 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 1 file changed, 78 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/cgroups/blkio-controller.txt b/Documentation/cgroups/blkio-controller.txt
index cd556b9..68b6a6a 100644
--- a/Documentation/cgroups/blkio-controller.txt
+++ b/Documentation/cgroups/blkio-controller.txt
@@ -387,8 +387,81 @@ groups and put applications in that group which are not driving enough
 IO to keep disk busy. In that case set group_idle=0, and CFQ will not idle
 on individual groups and throughput should improve.
 
-What works
-==========
-- Currently only sync IO queues are support. All the buffered writes are
-  still system wide and not per group. Hence we will not see service
-  differentiation between buffered writes between groups.
+Writeback
+=========
+
+Page cache is dirtied through buffered writes and shared mmaps and
+written asynchronously to the backing filesystem by the writeback
+mechanism.  Writeback sits between the memory and IO domains and
+regulates the proportion of dirty memory by balancing dirtying and
+write IOs.
+
+On traditional cgroup hierarchies, relationships between different
+controllers cannot be established making it impossible for writeback
+to operate accounting for cgroup resource restrictions and all
+writeback IOs are attributed to the root cgroup.
+
+If both the blkio and memory controllers are used on the v2 hierarchy
+and the filesystem supports cgroup writeback, writeback operations
+correctly follow the resource restrictions imposed by both memory and
+blkio controllers.
+
+Writeback examines both system-wide and per-cgroup dirty memory status
+and enforces the more restrictive of the two.  Also, writeback control
+parameters which are absolute values - vm.dirty_bytes and
+vm.dirty_background_bytes - are distributed across cgroups according
+to their current writeback bandwidth.
+
+There's a peculiarity stemming from the discrepancy in ownership
+granularity between memory controller and writeback.  While memory
+controller tracks ownership per page, writeback operates on inode
+basis.  cgroup writeback bridges the gap by tracking ownership by
+inode but migrating ownership if too many foreign pages, pages which
+don't match the current inode ownership, have been encountered while
+writing back the inode.
+
+This is a conscious design choice as writeback operations are
+inherently tied to inodes making strictly following page ownership
+complicated and inefficient.  The only use case which suffers from
+this compromise is multiple cgroups concurrently dirtying disjoint
+regions of the same inode, which is an unlikely use case and decided
+to be unsupported.  Note that as memory controller assigns page
+ownership on the first use and doesn't update it until the page is
+released, even if cgroup writeback strictly follows page ownership,
+multiple cgroups dirtying overlapping areas wouldn't work as expected.
+In general, write-sharing an inode across multiple cgroups is not well
+supported.
+
+Filesystem support for cgroup writeback
+---------------------------------------
+
+A filesystem can make writeback IOs cgroup-aware by updating
+address_space_operations->writepage[s]() to annotate bio's using the
+following two functions.
+
+* wbc_init_bio(@wbc, @bio)
+
+  Should be called for each bio carrying writeback data and associates
+  the bio with the inode's owner cgroup.  Can be called anytime
+  between bio allocation and submission.
+
+* wbc_account_io(@wbc, @page, @bytes)
+
+  Should be called for each data segment being written out.  While
+  this function doesn't care exactly when it's called during the
+  writeback session, it's the easiest and most natural to call it as
+  data segments are added to a bio.
+
+With writeback bio's annotated, cgroup support can be enabled per
+super_block by setting MS_CGROUPWB in ->s_flags.  This allows for
+selective disabling of cgroup writeback support which is helpful when
+certain filesystem features, e.g. journaled data mode, are
+incompatible.
+
+wbc_init_bio() binds the specified bio to its cgroup.  Depending on
+the configuration, the bio may be executed at a lower priority and if
+the writeback session is holding shared resources, e.g. a journal
+entry, may lead to priority inversion.  There is no one easy solution
+for the problem.  Filesystems can try to work around specific problem
+cases by skipping wbc_init_bio() or using bio_associate_blkcg()
+directly.
-- 
2.4.2

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/