xfs: enable background pushing of the CIL

If we let the CIL grow without bound, it will grow large enough to violate
recovery constraints (must be at least one complete transaction in the log at
all times) or take forever to write out through the log buffers. Hence we need
a check during asynchronous transactions as to whether the CIL needs to be
pushed.

We track the amount of log space the CIL consumes, so it is relatively simple
to limit it on a pure size basis. Make the limit the minimum of just under half
the log size (recovery constraint) or 8MB of log space (which is an awful lot
of metadata).

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>

1 files changed, 25 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_cil.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_cil.c
index 53abd6b..9b21f80 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_cil.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_cil.c
@@ -336,6 +336,7 @@ xfs_log_commit_cil(
 {
 	struct log		*log = mp->m_log;
 	int			log_flags = 0;
+	int			push = 0;
 
 	if (flags & XFS_TRANS_RELEASE_LOG_RES)
 		log_flags = XFS_LOG_REL_PERM_RESERV;
@@ -365,8 +366,20 @@ xfs_log_commit_cil(
 	xfs_log_done(mp, tp->t_ticket, NULL, log_flags);
 	xfs_trans_unreserve_and_mod_sb(tp);
 
-	/* background commit is allowed again */
+	/* check for background commit before unlock */
+	if (log->l_cilp->xc_ctx->space_used > XLOG_CIL_SPACE_LIMIT(log))
+		push = 1;
 	up_read(&log->l_cilp->xc_ctx_lock);
+
+	/*
+	 * We need to push CIL every so often so we don't cache more than we
+	 * can fit in the log. The limit really is that a checkpoint can't be
+	 * more than half the log (the current checkpoint is not allowed to
+	 * overwrite the previous checkpoint), but commit latency and memory
+	 * usage limit this to a smaller size in most cases.
+	 */
+	if (push)
+		xlog_cil_push(log, 0);
 	return 0;
 }
 
@@ -429,18 +442,25 @@ xlog_cil_push(
 	if (!cil)
 		return 0;
 
-	/* XXX: don't sleep for background? */
 	new_ctx = kmem_zalloc(sizeof(*new_ctx), KM_SLEEP|KM_NOFS);
 	new_ctx->ticket = xlog_cil_ticket_alloc(log);
 
-	/* lock out transaction commit */
-	down_write(&cil->xc_ctx_lock);
+	/* lock out transaction commit, but don't block on background push */
+	if (!down_write_trylock(&cil->xc_ctx_lock)) {
+		if (!push_now)
+			goto out_free_ticket;
+		down_write(&cil->xc_ctx_lock);
+	}
 	ctx = cil->xc_ctx;
 
 	/* check if we've anything to push */
 	if (list_empty(&cil->xc_cil))
 		goto out_skip;
 
+	/* check for spurious background flush */
+	if (!push_now && cil->xc_ctx->space_used < XLOG_CIL_SPACE_LIMIT(log))
+		goto out_skip;
+
 	/*
 	 * pull all the log vectors off the items in the CIL, and
 	 * remove the items from the CIL. We don't need the CIL lock
@@ -584,6 +604,7 @@ restart:
 
 out_skip:
 	up_write(&cil->xc_ctx_lock);
+out_free_ticket:
 	xfs_log_ticket_put(new_ctx->ticket);
 	kmem_free(new_ctx);
 	return 0;