xfs: CIL work is serialised, not pipelined

Because we use a single work structure attached to the CIL rather
than the CIL context, we can only queue a single work item at a
time. This results in the CIL being single threaded and limits
performance when it becomes CPU bound.

The design of the CIL is that it is pipelined and multiple commits
can be running concurrently, but the way the work is currently
implemented means that it is not pipelining as it was intended. The
critical work to switch the CIL context can take a few milliseconds
to run, but the rest of the CIL context flush can take hundreds of
milliseconds to complete. The context switching is the serialisation
point of the CIL, once the context has been switched the rest of the
context push can run asynchrnously with all other context pushes.

Hence we can move the work to the CIL context so that we can run
multiple CIL pushes at the same time and spread the majority of
the work out over multiple CPUs. We can keep the per-cpu CIL commit
state on the CIL rather than the context, because the context is
pinned to the CIL until the switch is done and we aggregate and
drain the per-cpu state held on the CIL during the context switch.

However, because we no longer serialise the CIL work, we can have
effectively unlimited CIL pushes in progress. We don't want to do
this - not only does it create contention on the iclogs and the
state machine locks, we can run the log right out of space with
outstanding pushes. Instead, limit the work concurrency to 4
concurrent works being processed at a time. This is enough
concurrency to remove the CIL from being a CPU bound bottleneck but
not enough to create new contention points or unbound concurrency
issues.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_super.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_super.c
index 53ce25008948..6d42883b8fae 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_super.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_super.c
@@ -518,9 +518,13 @@ xfs_init_mount_workqueues(
 	if (!mp->m_unwritten_workqueue)
 		goto out_destroy_buf;
 
+	/*
+	 * Limit the CIL pipeline depth to 4 concurrent works to bound the
+	 * concurrency the log spinlocks will be exposed to.
+	 */
 	mp->m_cil_workqueue = alloc_workqueue("xfs-cil/%s",
 			XFS_WQFLAGS(WQ_FREEZABLE | WQ_MEM_RECLAIM | WQ_UNBOUND),
-			0, mp->m_super->s_id);
+			4, mp->m_super->s_id);
 	if (!mp->m_cil_workqueue)
 		goto out_destroy_unwritten;