writeback: add comment to the dirty limit functions

Document global_dirty_limits() and bdi_dirty_limit().

Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 28 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
index 1ea13ef350a..20890d80c7e 100644
--- a/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ b/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -261,11 +261,18 @@ static inline void task_dirties_fraction(struct task_struct *tsk,
 }
 
 /*
- * scale the dirty limit
+ * task_dirty_limit - scale down dirty throttling threshold for one task
  *
  * task specific dirty limit:
  *
  *   dirty -= (dirty/8) * p_{t}
+ *
+ * To protect light/slow dirtying tasks from heavier/fast ones, we start
+ * throttling individual tasks before reaching the bdi dirty limit.
+ * Relatively low thresholds will be allocated to heavy dirtiers. So when
+ * dirty pages grow large, heavy dirtiers will be throttled first, which will
+ * effectively curb the growth of dirty pages. Light dirtiers with high enough
+ * dirty threshold may never get throttled.
  */
 static unsigned long task_dirty_limit(struct task_struct *tsk,
 				       unsigned long bdi_dirty)
@@ -390,6 +397,15 @@ unsigned long determine_dirtyable_memory(void)
 	return x + 1;	/* Ensure that we never return 0 */
 }
 
+/**
+ * global_dirty_limits - background-writeback and dirty-throttling thresholds
+ *
+ * Calculate the dirty thresholds based on sysctl parameters
+ * - vm.dirty_background_ratio  or  vm.dirty_background_bytes
+ * - vm.dirty_ratio             or  vm.dirty_bytes
+ * The dirty limits will be lifted by 1/4 for PF_LESS_THROTTLE (ie. nfsd) and
+ * runtime tasks.
+ */
 void global_dirty_limits(unsigned long *pbackground, unsigned long *pdirty)
 {
 	unsigned long background;
@@ -424,8 +440,17 @@ void global_dirty_limits(unsigned long *pbackground, unsigned long *pdirty)
 	*pdirty = dirty;
 }
 
-unsigned long bdi_dirty_limit(struct backing_dev_info *bdi,
-			       unsigned long dirty)
+/**
+ * bdi_dirty_limit - @bdi's share of dirty throttling threshold
+ *
+ * Allocate high/low dirty limits to fast/slow devices, in order to prevent
+ * - starving fast devices
+ * - piling up dirty pages (that will take long time to sync) on slow devices
+ *
+ * The bdi's share of dirty limit will be adapting to its throughput and
+ * bounded by the bdi->min_ratio and/or bdi->max_ratio parameters, if set.
+ */
+unsigned long bdi_dirty_limit(struct backing_dev_info *bdi, unsigned long dirty)
 {
 	u64 bdi_dirty;
 	long numerator, denominator;