btrfs: improve preemptive background space flushing

Currently if we ever have to flush space because we do not have enough
we allocate a ticket and attach it to the space_info, and then
systematically flush things in the filesystem that hold space
reservations until our space is reclaimed.

However this has a latency cost, we must go to sleep and wait for the
flushing to make progress before we are woken up and allowed to continue
doing our work.

In order to address that we used to kick off the async worker to flush
space preemptively, so that we could be reclaiming space hopefully
before any tasks needed to stop and wait for space to reclaim.

When I introduced the ticketed ENOSPC stuff this broke slightly in the
fact that we were using tickets to indicate if we were done flushing.
No tickets, no more flushing.  However this meant that we essentially
never preemptively flushed.  This caused a write performance regression
that Nikolay noticed in an unrelated patch that removed the committing
of the transaction during btrfs_end_transaction.

The behavior that happened pre that patch was btrfs_end_transaction()
would see that we were low on space, and it would commit the
transaction.  This was bad because in this particular case you could end
up with thousands and thousands of transactions being committed during
the 5 minute reproducer.  With the patch to remove this behavior we got
much more sane transaction commits, but we ended up slower because we
would write for a while, flush, write for a while, flush again.

To address this we need to reinstate a preemptive flushing mechanism.
However it is distinctly different from our ticketing flushing in that
it doesn't have tickets to base it's decisions on.  Instead of bolting
this logic into our existing flushing work, add another worker to handle
this preemptive flushing.  Here we will attempt to be slightly
intelligent about the things that we flushing, attempting to balance
between whichever pool is taking up the most space.

Reviewed-by: Nikolay Borisov <nborisov@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/btrfs/ctree.h b/fs/btrfs/ctree.h
index 90726954b883..a9b0521d9e89 100644
--- a/fs/btrfs/ctree.h
+++ b/fs/btrfs/ctree.h
@@ -933,6 +933,7 @@ struct btrfs_fs_info {
 	/* Used to reclaim the metadata space in the background. */
 	struct work_struct async_reclaim_work;
 	struct work_struct async_data_reclaim_work;
+	struct work_struct preempt_reclaim_work;
 
 	spinlock_t unused_bgs_lock;
 	struct list_head unused_bgs;