xfs: Do background CIL flushes via a workqueue

Doing background CIL flushes adds significant latency to whatever
async transaction that triggers it. To avoid blocking async
transactions on things like waiting for log buffer IO to complete,
move the CIL push off into a workqueue.  By moving the push work
into a workqueue, we remove all the latency that the commit adds
from the foreground transaction commit path. This also means that
single threaded workloads won't do the CIL push procssing, leaving
them more CPU to do more async transactions.

To do this, we need to keep track of the sequence number we have
pushed work for. This avoids having many transaction commits
attempting to schedule work for the same sequence, and ensures that
we only ever have one push (background or forced) in progress at a
time. It also means that we don't need to take the CIL lock in write
mode to check for potential background push races, which reduces
lock contention.

To avoid potential issues with "smart" IO schedulers, don't use the
workqueue for log force triggered flushes. Instead, do them directly
so that the log IO is done directly by the process issuing the log
force and so doesn't get stuck on IO elevator queue idling
incorrectly delaying the log IO from the workqueue.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
index 2152900b79d4..735ff1ee53da 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
@@ -417,6 +417,8 @@ struct xfs_cil {
 	struct list_head	xc_committing;
 	wait_queue_head_t	xc_commit_wait;
 	xfs_lsn_t		xc_current_sequence;
+	struct work_struct	xc_push_work;
+	xfs_lsn_t		xc_push_seq;
 };
 
 /*