btrfs: use tagged writepage to mitigate livelock of snapshot

Snapshot is expected to be fast. But if there are writers steadily
creating dirty pages in our subvolume, the snapshot may take a very long
time to complete. To fix the problem, we use tagged writepage for
snapshot flusher as we do in the generic write_cache_pages(), so we can
omit pages dirtied after the snapshot command.

This does not change the semantics regarding which data get to the
snapshot, if there are pages being dirtied during the snapshotting
operation.  There's a sync called before snapshot is taken in old/new
case, any IO in flight just after that may be in the snapshot but this
depends on other system effects that might still sync the IO.

We do a simple snapshot speed test on a Intel D-1531 box:

fio --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=32 --bs=4k --rw=write --size=64G
--direct=0 --thread=1 --numjobs=1 --time_based --runtime=120
--filename=/mnt/sub/testfile --name=job1 --group_reporting & sleep 5;
time btrfs sub snap -r /mnt/sub /mnt/snap; killall fio

original: 1m58sec
patched:  6.54sec

This is the best case for this patch since for a sequential write case,
we omit nearly all pages dirtied after the snapshot command.

For a multi writers, random write test:

fio --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=32 --bs=4k --rw=randwrite --size=64G
--direct=0 --thread=1 --numjobs=4 --time_based --runtime=120
--filename=/mnt/sub/testfile --name=job1 --group_reporting & sleep 5;
time btrfs sub snap -r /mnt/sub /mnt/snap; killall fio

original: 15.83sec
patched:  10.35sec

The improvement is smaller compared to the sequential write case,
since we omit only half of the pages dirtied after snapshot command.

Reviewed-by: Nikolay Borisov <nborisov@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Ethan Lien <ethanlien@synology.com>
Reviewed-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/fs/btrfs/extent_io.c b/fs/btrfs/extent_io.c
index c1c4a8f204cb..926bf30c2f2e 100644
--- a/fs/btrfs/extent_io.c
+++ b/fs/btrfs/extent_io.c
@@ -3911,12 +3911,25 @@ static int extent_write_cache_pages(struct address_space *mapping,
 			range_whole = 1;
 		scanned = 1;
 	}
-	if (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL)
+
+	/*
+	 * We do the tagged writepage as long as the snapshot flush bit is set
+	 * and we are the first one who do the filemap_flush() on this inode.
+	 *
+	 * The nr_to_write == LONG_MAX is needed to make sure other flushers do
+	 * not race in and drop the bit.
+	 */
+	if (range_whole && wbc->nr_to_write == LONG_MAX &&
+	    test_and_clear_bit(BTRFS_INODE_SNAPSHOT_FLUSH,
+			       &BTRFS_I(inode)->runtime_flags))
+		wbc->tagged_writepages = 1;
+
+	if (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL || wbc->tagged_writepages)
 		tag = PAGECACHE_TAG_TOWRITE;
 	else
 		tag = PAGECACHE_TAG_DIRTY;
 retry:
-	if (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL)
+	if (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL || wbc->tagged_writepages)
 		tag_pages_for_writeback(mapping, index, end);
 	done_index = index;
 	while (!done && !nr_to_write_done && (index <= end) &&