Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Remove dependency on congestion_wait in mm/

[Mel Gorman]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 04:11:52PM +0200, David Sterba wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 01:50:58PM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 12:42:44PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 09:54:31AM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > > This has been lightly tested only and the testing was useless as the
> > > > relevant code was not executed. The workload configurations I had that
> > > > used to trigger these corner cases no longer work (yey?) and I'll need
> > > > to implement a new synthetic workload. If someone is aware of a realistic
> > > > workload that forces reclaim activity to the point where reclaim stalls
> > > > then kindly share the details.
> > > 
> > > The stereeotypical "stalling on I/O" problem is to plug in one of the
> > > crap USB drives you were given at a trade show and simply
> > > 	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb
> > > 	sync
> > > 
> > 
> > The test machines are 1500KM away so plugging in a USB stick but worst
> > comes to the worst, I could test it on a laptop.
> 
> There's a device mapper target dm-delay [1] that as it says delays the
> reads and writes, so you could try to emulate the slow USB that way.
> 
> [1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/device-mapper/delay.html

Ah, thanks for that tip. I wondered if something like this existed and
clearly did not search hard enough. I was able to reproduce the problem
without throttling but this could still be useful if examining cases
where there are 2 or more BDIs with variable speeds.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs