Re: [HELP] FUSE writeback performance bottleneck

[Miklos Szeredi]

On Tue, 4 Jun 2024 at 03:57, Jingbo Xu <jefflexu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> IIUC, there are two sources that may cause deadlock:
> 1) the fuse server needs memory allocation when processing FUSE_WRITE
> requests, which in turn triggers direct memory reclaim, and FUSE
> writeback then - deadlock here

Yep, see the folio_wait_writeback() call deep in the guts of direct
reclaim, which sleeps until the PG_writeback flag is cleared.  If that
happens to be triggered by the writeback in question, then that's a
deadlock.

> 2) a process that trigfgers direct memory reclaim or calls sync(2) may
> hang there forever, if the fuse server is buggyly or malicious and thus
> hang there when processing FUSE_WRITE requests

Ah, yes, sync(2) is also an interesting case.   We don't want unpriv
fuse servers to be able to block sync(2), which means that sync(2)
won't actually guarantee a synchronization of fuse's dirty pages.  I
don't think there's even a theoretical solution to that, but
apparently nobody cares...

Thanks,
Mikos

>
> Thus the temp page design was introduced to avoid the above potential
> issues.
>
> I think case 1 may be fixed (if any), but I don't know how case 2 can be
> avoided as any one could run a fuse server in unprivileged mode.  Or if
> case 2 really matters?  Please correct me if I miss something.
>
> --
> Thanks,
> Jingbo