writeback: bdi write bandwidth estimation

The estimation value will start from 100MB/s and adapt to the real
bandwidth in seconds.

It tries to update the bandwidth only when disk is fully utilized.
Any inactive period of more than one second will be skipped.

The estimated bandwidth will be reflecting how fast the device can
writeout when _fully utilized_, and won't drop to 0 when it goes idle.
The value will remain constant at disk idle time. At busy write time, if
not considering fluctuations, it will also remain high unless be knocked
down by possible concurrent reads that compete for the disk time and
bandwidth with async writes.

The estimation is not done purely in the flusher because there is no
guarantee for write_cache_pages() to return timely to update bandwidth.

The bdi->avg_write_bandwidth smoothing is very effective for filtering
out sudden spikes, however may be a little biased in long term.

The overheads are low because the bdi bandwidth update only occurs at
200ms intervals.

The 200ms update interval is suitable, because it's not possible to get
the real bandwidth for the instance at all, due to large fluctuations.

The NFS commits can be as large as seconds worth of data. One XFS
completion may be as large as half second worth of data if we are going
to increase the write chunk to half second worth of data. In ext4,
fluctuations with time period of around 5 seconds is observed. And there
is another pattern of irregular periods of up to 20 seconds on SSD tests.

That's why we are not only doing the estimation at 200ms intervals, but
also averaging them over a period of 3 seconds and then go further to do
another level of smoothing in avg_write_bandwidth.

CC: Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>
CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c
index 2c947da39f6e..5826992910e9 100644
--- a/fs/fs-writeback.c
+++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c
@@ -693,6 +693,16 @@ static inline bool over_bground_thresh(void)
 }
 
 /*
+ * Called under wb->list_lock. If there are multiple wb per bdi,
+ * only the flusher working on the first wb should do it.
+ */
+static void wb_update_bandwidth(struct bdi_writeback *wb,
+				unsigned long start_time)
+{
+	__bdi_update_bandwidth(wb->bdi, start_time);
+}
+
+/*
  * Explicit flushing or periodic writeback of "old" data.
  *
  * Define "old": the first time one of an inode's pages is dirtied, we mark the
@@ -710,6 +720,7 @@ static inline bool over_bground_thresh(void)
 static long wb_writeback(struct bdi_writeback *wb,
 			 struct wb_writeback_work *work)
 {
+	unsigned long wb_start = jiffies;
 	long nr_pages = work->nr_pages;
 	unsigned long oldest_jif;
 	struct inode *inode;
@@ -758,6 +769,8 @@ static long wb_writeback(struct bdi_writeback *wb,
 			progress = __writeback_inodes_wb(wb, work);
 		trace_writeback_written(wb->bdi, work);
 
+		wb_update_bandwidth(wb, wb_start);
+
 		/*
 		 * Did we write something? Try for more
 		 *