linux/Documentation/filesystems/caching/operations.txt
NeilBrown 743162013d sched: Remove proliferation of wait_on_bit() action functions
The current "wait_on_bit" interface requires an 'action'
function to be provided which does the actual waiting.
There are over 20 such functions, many of them identical.
Most cases can be satisfied by one of just two functions, one
which uses io_schedule() and one which just uses schedule().

So:
 Rename wait_on_bit and        wait_on_bit_lock to
        wait_on_bit_action and wait_on_bit_lock_action
 to make it explicit that they need an action function.

 Introduce new wait_on_bit{,_lock} and wait_on_bit{,_lock}_io
 which are *not* given an action function but implicitly use
 a standard one.
 The decision to error-out if a signal is pending is now made
 based on the 'mode' argument rather than being encoded in the action
 function.

 All instances of the old wait_on_bit and wait_on_bit_lock which
 can use the new version have been changed accordingly and their
 action functions have been discarded.
 wait_on_bit{_lock} does not return any specific error code in the
 event of a signal so the caller must check for non-zero and
 interpolate their own error code as appropriate.

The wait_on_bit() call in __fscache_wait_on_invalidate() was
ambiguous as it specified TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE but used
fscache_wait_bit_interruptible as an action function.
David Howells confirms this should be uniformly
"uninterruptible"

The main remaining user of wait_on_bit{,_lock}_action is NFS
which needs to use a freezer-aware schedule() call.

A comment in fs/gfs2/glock.c notes that having multiple 'action'
functions is useful as they display differently in the 'wchan'
field of 'ps'. (and /proc/$PID/wchan).
As the new bit_wait{,_io} functions are tagged "__sched", they
will not show up at all, but something higher in the stack.  So
the distinction will still be visible, only with different
function names (gds2_glock_wait versus gfs2_glock_dq_wait in the
gfs2/glock.c case).

Since first version of this patch (against 3.15) two new action
functions appeared, on in NFS and one in CIFS.  CIFS also now
uses an action function that makes the same freezer aware
schedule call as NFS.

Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Acked-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> (fscache, keys)
Acked-by: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com> (gfs2)
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: Steve French <sfrench@samba.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20140707051603.28027.72349.stgit@notabene.brown
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
2014-07-16 15:10:39 +02:00

214 lines
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================================
ASYNCHRONOUS OPERATIONS HANDLING
================================
By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Contents:
(*) Overview.
(*) Operation record initialisation.
(*) Parameters.
(*) Procedure.
(*) Asynchronous callback.
========
OVERVIEW
========
FS-Cache has an asynchronous operations handling facility that it uses for its
data storage and retrieval routines. Its operations are represented by
fscache_operation structs, though these are usually embedded into some other
structure.
This facility is available to and expected to be be used by the cache backends,
and FS-Cache will create operations and pass them off to the appropriate cache
backend for completion.
To make use of this facility, <linux/fscache-cache.h> should be #included.
===============================
OPERATION RECORD INITIALISATION
===============================
An operation is recorded in an fscache_operation struct:
struct fscache_operation {
union {
struct work_struct fast_work;
struct slow_work slow_work;
};
unsigned long flags;
fscache_operation_processor_t processor;
...
};
Someone wanting to issue an operation should allocate something with this
struct embedded in it. They should initialise it by calling:
void fscache_operation_init(struct fscache_operation *op,
fscache_operation_release_t release);
with the operation to be initialised and the release function to use.
The op->flags parameter should be set to indicate the CPU time provision and
the exclusivity (see the Parameters section).
The op->fast_work, op->slow_work and op->processor flags should be set as
appropriate for the CPU time provision (see the Parameters section).
FSCACHE_OP_WAITING may be set in op->flags prior to each submission of the
operation and waited for afterwards.
==========
PARAMETERS
==========
There are a number of parameters that can be set in the operation record's flag
parameter. There are three options for the provision of CPU time in these
operations:
(1) The operation may be done synchronously (FSCACHE_OP_MYTHREAD). A thread
may decide it wants to handle an operation itself without deferring it to
another thread.
This is, for example, used in read operations for calling readpages() on
the backing filesystem in CacheFiles. Although readpages() does an
asynchronous data fetch, the determination of whether pages exist is done
synchronously - and the netfs does not proceed until this has been
determined.
If this option is to be used, FSCACHE_OP_WAITING must be set in op->flags
before submitting the operation, and the operating thread must wait for it
to be cleared before proceeding:
wait_on_bit(&op->flags, FSCACHE_OP_WAITING,
TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE);
(2) The operation may be fast asynchronous (FSCACHE_OP_FAST), in which case it
will be given to keventd to process. Such an operation is not permitted
to sleep on I/O.
This is, for example, used by CacheFiles to copy data from a backing fs
page to a netfs page after the backing fs has read the page in.
If this option is used, op->fast_work and op->processor must be
initialised before submitting the operation:
INIT_WORK(&op->fast_work, do_some_work);
(3) The operation may be slow asynchronous (FSCACHE_OP_SLOW), in which case it
will be given to the slow work facility to process. Such an operation is
permitted to sleep on I/O.
This is, for example, used by FS-Cache to handle background writes of
pages that have just been fetched from a remote server.
If this option is used, op->slow_work and op->processor must be
initialised before submitting the operation:
fscache_operation_init_slow(op, processor)
Furthermore, operations may be one of two types:
(1) Exclusive (FSCACHE_OP_EXCLUSIVE). Operations of this type may not run in
conjunction with any other operation on the object being operated upon.
An example of this is the attribute change operation, in which the file
being written to may need truncation.
(2) Shareable. Operations of this type may be running simultaneously. It's
up to the operation implementation to prevent interference between other
operations running at the same time.
=========
PROCEDURE
=========
Operations are used through the following procedure:
(1) The submitting thread must allocate the operation and initialise it
itself. Normally this would be part of a more specific structure with the
generic op embedded within.
(2) The submitting thread must then submit the operation for processing using
one of the following two functions:
int fscache_submit_op(struct fscache_object *object,
struct fscache_operation *op);
int fscache_submit_exclusive_op(struct fscache_object *object,
struct fscache_operation *op);
The first function should be used to submit non-exclusive ops and the
second to submit exclusive ones. The caller must still set the
FSCACHE_OP_EXCLUSIVE flag.
If successful, both functions will assign the operation to the specified
object and return 0. -ENOBUFS will be returned if the object specified is
permanently unavailable.
The operation manager will defer operations on an object that is still
undergoing lookup or creation. The operation will also be deferred if an
operation of conflicting exclusivity is in progress on the object.
If the operation is asynchronous, the manager will retain a reference to
it, so the caller should put their reference to it by passing it to:
void fscache_put_operation(struct fscache_operation *op);
(3) If the submitting thread wants to do the work itself, and has marked the
operation with FSCACHE_OP_MYTHREAD, then it should monitor
FSCACHE_OP_WAITING as described above and check the state of the object if
necessary (the object might have died whilst the thread was waiting).
When it has finished doing its processing, it should call
fscache_op_complete() and fscache_put_operation() on it.
(4) The operation holds an effective lock upon the object, preventing other
exclusive ops conflicting until it is released. The operation can be
enqueued for further immediate asynchronous processing by adjusting the
CPU time provisioning option if necessary, eg:
op->flags &= ~FSCACHE_OP_TYPE;
op->flags |= ~FSCACHE_OP_FAST;
and calling:
void fscache_enqueue_operation(struct fscache_operation *op)
This can be used to allow other things to have use of the worker thread
pools.
=====================
ASYNCHRONOUS CALLBACK
=====================
When used in asynchronous mode, the worker thread pool will invoke the
processor method with a pointer to the operation. This should then get at the
container struct by using container_of():
static void fscache_write_op(struct fscache_operation *_op)
{
struct fscache_storage *op =
container_of(_op, struct fscache_storage, op);
...
}
The caller holds a reference on the operation, and will invoke
fscache_put_operation() when the processor function returns. The processor
function is at liberty to call fscache_enqueue_operation() or to take extra
references.