[PATCH v1 0/2] io_uring/io-wq: let workers exit when unused

[Li Chen]

io_uring uses io-wq to offload regular file I/O. When that happens, the kernel
creates per-task iou-wrk-<tgid> workers (PF_IO_WORKER) via create_io_thread(),
so the worker is part of the process thread group and shows up under
/proc/<pid>/task/.

io-wq shrinks the pool on idle, but it intentionally keeps the last worker
around indefinitely as a keepalive to avoid churn. Combined with io_uring's
per-task context lifetime (tctx stays attached to the task until exit), a
process may permanently retain an idle iou-wrk thread even after it has closed
its last io_uring instance and has no active rings.

The keepalive behavior is a reasonable default(I guess): workloads may have
bursty I/O patterns, and always tearing down the last worker would add thread
churn and latency. Creating io-wq workers goes through create_io_thread()
(copy_process), which is not cheap to do repeatedly.

However, CRIU currently doesn't cope well with such workers being part of the
checkpointed thread group. The iou-wrk thread is a kernel-managed worker
(PF_IO_WORKER) running io_wq_worker() on a kernel stack, rather than a normal
userspace thread executing application code. In our setup, if the iou-wrk
thread remains present after quiescing and closing the last io_uring instance,
criu dump may hang while trying to stop and dump the thread group.

Besides the resource overhead and surprising userspace-visible threads, this is
a problem for checkpoint/restore. CRIU needs to freeze and dump all threads in
the thread group. With a lingering iou-wrk thread, we observed criu dump can
hang even after the ring has been quiesced and the io_uring fd closed, e.g.:

  criu dump -t $PID -D images -o dump.log -v4 --shell-job
  ps -T -p $PID -o pid,tid,comm | grep iou-wrk

This series is a kernel-side enabler for checkpoint/restore in the current
reality where userspace needs to quiesce and close io_uring rings before dump.
It is not trying to make io_uring rings checkpointable, nor does it change what
CRIU can or cannot restore (e.g. in-flight SQEs/CQEs, SQPOLL, SQE128/CQE32,
registered resources). Even with userspace gaining limited io_uring support,
this series only targets the specific "no active io_uring contexts left, but an
idle iou-wrk keepalive thread remains" case.

This series adds an explicit exit-on-idle mode to io-wq, and toggles it from
io_uring task context when the task has no active io_uring contexts
(xa_empty(&tctx->xa)). The mode is cleared on subsequent io_uring usage, so the
default behavior for active io_uring users is unchanged.

Tested on x86_64 with CRIU 4.2.
With this series applied, after closing the ring iou-wrk exited within ~200ms
and criu dump completed.

Li Chen (2):
  io-wq: add exit-on-idle mode
  io_uring: allow io-wq workers to exit when unused

 io_uring/io-wq.c | 31 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 io_uring/io-wq.h |  1 +
 io_uring/tctx.c  | 11 +++++++++++
 3 files changed, 43 insertions(+)

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2.52.0