writeback: introduce smoothed global dirty limit

The start of a heavy weight application (ie. KVM) may instantly knock
down determine_dirtyable_memory() if the swap is not enabled or full.
global_dirty_limits() and bdi_dirty_limit() will in turn get global/bdi
dirty thresholds that are _much_ lower than the global/bdi dirty pages.

balance_dirty_pages() will then heavily throttle all dirtiers including
the light ones, until the dirty pages drop below the new dirty thresholds.
During this _deep_ dirty-exceeded state, the system may appear rather
unresponsive to the users.

About "deep" dirty-exceeded: task_dirty_limit() assigns 1/8 lower dirty
threshold to heavy dirtiers than light ones, and the dirty pages will
be throttled around the heavy dirtiers' dirty threshold and reasonably
below the light dirtiers' dirty threshold. In this state, only the heavy
dirtiers will be throttled and the dirty pages are carefully controlled
to not exceed the light dirtiers' dirty threshold. However if the
threshold itself suddenly drops below the number of dirty pages, the
light dirtiers will get heavily throttled.

So introduce global_dirty_limit for tracking the global dirty threshold
with policies

- follow downwards slowly
- follow up in one shot

global_dirty_limit can effectively mask out the impact of sudden drop of
dirtyable memory. It will be used in the next patch for two new type of
dirty limits. Note that the new dirty limits are not going to avoid
throttling the light dirtiers, but could limit their sleep time to 200ms.

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/writeback.h b/include/linux/writeback.h
index 66862f2d90c..e9d371b6053 100644
--- a/include/linux/writeback.h
+++ b/include/linux/writeback.h
@@ -84,6 +84,8 @@ static inline void laptop_sync_completion(void) { }
 #endif
 void throttle_vm_writeout(gfp_t gfp_mask);
 
+extern unsigned long global_dirty_limit;
+
 /* These are exported to sysctl. */
 extern int dirty_background_ratio;
 extern unsigned long dirty_background_bytes;
@@ -119,6 +121,10 @@ unsigned long bdi_dirty_limit(struct backing_dev_info *bdi,
 			       unsigned long dirty);
 
 void __bdi_update_bandwidth(struct backing_dev_info *bdi,
+			    unsigned long thresh,
+			    unsigned long dirty,
+			    unsigned long bdi_thresh,
+			    unsigned long bdi_dirty,
 			    unsigned long start_time);
 
 void page_writeback_init(void);