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4e159150a9
[BUG]
There is an internal report that over 1000 processes are
waiting at the io_schedule_timeout() of balance_dirty_pages(), causing
a system hang and trigger a kernel coredump.
The kernel is v6.4 kernel based, but the root problem still applies to
any upstream kernel before v6.18.
[CAUSE]
From Jan Kara for his wisdom on the dirty page balance behavior first.
This cgroup dirty limit was what was actually playing the role here
because the cgroup had only a small amount of memory and so the dirty
limit for it was something like 16MB.
Dirty throttling is responsible for enforcing that nobody can dirty
(significantly) more dirty memory than there's dirty limit. Thus when
a task is dirtying pages it periodically enters into balance_dirty_pages()
and we let it sleep there to slow down the dirtying.
When the system is over dirty limit already (either globally or within
a cgroup of the running task), we will not let the task exit from
balance_dirty_pages() until the number of dirty pages drops below the
limit.
So in this particular case, as I already mentioned, there was a cgroup
with relatively small amount of memory and as a result with dirty limit
set at 16MB. A task from that cgroup has dirtied about 28MB worth of
pages in btrfs btree inode and these were practically the only dirty
pages in that cgroup.
So that means the only way to reduce the dirty pages of that cgroup is
to writeback the dirty pages of btrfs btree inode, and only after that
those processes can exit balance_dirty_pages().
Now back to the btrfs part, btree_writepages() is responsible for
writing back dirty btree inode pages.
The problem here is, there is a btrfs internal threshold that if the
btree inode's dirty bytes are below the 32M threshold, it will not
do any writeback.
This behavior is to batch as much metadata as possible so we won't write
back those tree blocks and then later re-COW them again for another
modification.
This internal 32MiB is higher than the existing dirty page size (28MiB),
meaning no writeback will happen, causing a deadlock between btrfs and
cgroup:
- Btrfs doesn't want to write back btree inode until more dirty pages
- Cgroup/MM doesn't want more dirty pages for btrfs btree inode
Thus any process touching that btree inode is put into sleep until
the number of dirty pages is reduced.
Thanks Jan Kara a lot for the analysis of the root cause.
[ENHANCEMENT]
Since kernel commit
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Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.