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authorDarrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>2021-01-22 16:48:41 -0800
committerDarrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>2021-02-03 09:18:49 -0800
commitf83d436aef5def77b318effc14809fdc57092588 (patch)
treee1fc94c9c3e2dcf9ebf881d30716d7c33dd78897 /Documentation/admin-guide/xfs.rst
parenta1a7d05a05765eec042942a5c360e909c0dd0131 (diff)
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xfs: increase the default parallelism levels of pwork clients
Increase the parallelism level for pwork clients to the workqueue defaults so that we can take advantage of computers with a lot of CPUs and a lot of hardware. On fast systems this will speed up quotacheck by a large factor, and the following posteof/cowblocks cleanup series will use the functionality presented in this patch to run garbage collection as quickly as possible. We do this by switching the pwork workqueue to unbounded, since the current user (quotacheck) runs lengthy scans for each work item and we don't care about dispatching the work on a warm cpu cache or anything like that. Also set WQ_SYSFS so that we can monitor where the wq is running. Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Reviewed-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
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diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/xfs.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/xfs.rst
index 86de8a1ad91c..b00b1eece9de 100644
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+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/xfs.rst
@@ -495,3 +495,41 @@ the class and error context. For example, the default values for
"metadata/ENODEV" are "0" rather than "-1" so that this error handler defaults
to "fail immediately" behaviour. This is done because ENODEV is a fatal,
unrecoverable error no matter how many times the metadata IO is retried.
+
+Workqueue Concurrency
+=====================
+
+XFS uses kernel workqueues to parallelize metadata update processes. This
+enables it to take advantage of storage hardware that can service many IO
+operations simultaneously. This interface exposes internal implementation
+details of XFS, and as such is explicitly not part of any userspace API/ABI
+guarantee the kernel may give userspace. These are undocumented features of
+the generic workqueue implementation XFS uses for concurrency, and they are
+provided here purely for diagnostic and tuning purposes and may change at any
+time in the future.
+
+The control knobs for a filesystem's workqueues are organized by task at hand
+and the short name of the data device. They all can be found in:
+
+ /sys/bus/workqueue/devices/${task}!${device}
+
+================ ===========
+ Task Description
+================ ===========
+ xfs_iwalk-$pid Inode scans of the entire filesystem. Currently limited to
+ mount time quotacheck.
+================ ===========
+
+For example, the knobs for the quotacheck workqueue for /dev/nvme0n1 would be
+found in /sys/bus/workqueue/devices/xfs_iwalk-1111!nvme0n1/.
+
+The interesting knobs for XFS workqueues are as follows:
+
+============ ===========
+ Knob Description
+============ ===========
+ max_active Maximum number of background threads that can be started to
+ run the work.
+ cpumask CPUs upon which the threads are allowed to run.
+ nice Relative priority of scheduling the threads. These are the
+ same nice levels that can be applied to userspace processes.