xref: /linux/Documentation/filesystems/gfs2-glocks.rst (revision c532de5a67a70f8533d495f8f2aaa9a0491c3ad0)
1.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
2
3============================
4Glock internal locking rules
5============================
6
7This documents the basic principles of the glock state machine
8internals. Each glock (struct gfs2_glock in fs/gfs2/incore.h)
9has two main (internal) locks:
10
11 1. A spinlock (gl_lockref.lock) which protects the internal state such
12    as gl_state, gl_target and the list of holders (gl_holders)
13 2. A non-blocking bit lock, GLF_LOCK, which is used to prevent other
14    threads from making calls to the DLM, etc. at the same time. If a
15    thread takes this lock, it must then call run_queue (usually via the
16    workqueue) when it releases it in order to ensure any pending tasks
17    are completed.
18
19The gl_holders list contains all the queued lock requests (not
20just the holders) associated with the glock. If there are any
21held locks, then they will be contiguous entries at the head
22of the list. Locks are granted in strictly the order that they
23are queued.
24
25There are three lock states that users of the glock layer can request,
26namely shared (SH), deferred (DF) and exclusive (EX). Those translate
27to the following DLM lock modes:
28
29==========	====== =====================================================
30Glock mode      DLM    lock mode
31==========	====== =====================================================
32    UN          IV/NL  Unlocked (no DLM lock associated with glock) or NL
33    SH          PR     (Protected read)
34    DF          CW     (Concurrent write)
35    EX          EX     (Exclusive)
36==========	====== =====================================================
37
38Thus DF is basically a shared mode which is incompatible with the "normal"
39shared lock mode, SH. In GFS2 the DF mode is used exclusively for direct I/O
40operations. The glocks are basically a lock plus some routines which deal
41with cache management. The following rules apply for the cache:
42
43==========      ==============   ==========   ==========   ==============
44Glock mode      Cache Metadata   Cache data   Dirty Data   Dirty Metadata
45==========      ==============   ==========   ==========   ==============
46    UN                No            No            No            No
47    DF                Yes           No            No            No
48    SH                Yes           Yes           No            No
49    EX                Yes           Yes           Yes           Yes
50==========      ==============   ==========   ==========   ==============
51
52These rules are implemented using the various glock operations which
53are defined for each type of glock. Not all types of glocks use
54all the modes. Only inode glocks use the DF mode for example.
55
56Table of glock operations and per type constants:
57
58==============     =============================================================
59Field              Purpose
60==============     =============================================================
61go_sync            Called before remote state change (e.g. to sync dirty data)
62go_xmote_bh        Called after remote state change (e.g. to refill cache)
63go_inval           Called if remote state change requires invalidating the cache
64go_instantiate     Called when a glock has been acquired
65go_held            Called every time a glock holder is acquired
66go_dump            Called to print content of object for debugfs file, or on
67                   error to dump glock to the log.
68go_callback	   Called if the DLM sends a callback to drop this lock
69go_unlocked        Called when a glock is unlocked (dlm_unlock())
70go_type            The type of the glock, ``LM_TYPE_*``
71go_flags	   GLOF_ASPACE is set, if the glock has an address space
72                   associated with it
73==============     =============================================================
74
75The minimum hold time for each lock is the time after a remote lock
76grant for which we ignore remote demote requests. This is in order to
77prevent a situation where locks are being bounced around the cluster
78from node to node with none of the nodes making any progress. This
79tends to show up most with shared mmapped files which are being written
80to by multiple nodes. By delaying the demotion in response to a
81remote callback, that gives the userspace program time to make
82some progress before the pages are unmapped.
83
84Eventually, we hope to make the glock "EX" mode locally shared such that any
85local locking will be done with the i_mutex as required rather than via the
86glock.
87
88Locking rules for glock operations:
89
90==============   ======================    =============================
91Operation        GLF_LOCK bit lock held    gl_lockref.lock spinlock held
92==============   ======================    =============================
93go_sync               Yes                       No
94go_xmote_bh           Yes                       No
95go_inval              Yes                       No
96go_instantiate        No                        No
97go_held               No                        No
98go_dump               Sometimes                 Yes
99go_callback           Sometimes (N/A)           Yes
100go_unlocked           Yes                       No
101==============   ======================    =============================
102
103.. Note::
104
105   Operations must not drop either the bit lock or the spinlock
106   if its held on entry. go_dump and do_demote_ok must never block.
107   Note that go_dump will only be called if the glock's state
108   indicates that it is caching uptodate data.
109
110Glock locking order within GFS2:
111
112 1. i_rwsem (if required)
113 2. Rename glock (for rename only)
114 3. Inode glock(s)
115    (Parents before children, inodes at "same level" with same parent in
116    lock number order)
117 4. Rgrp glock(s) (for (de)allocation operations)
118 5. Transaction glock (via gfs2_trans_begin) for non-read operations
119 6. i_rw_mutex (if required)
120 7. Page lock  (always last, very important!)
121
122There are two glocks per inode. One deals with access to the inode
123itself (locking order as above), and the other, known as the iopen
124glock is used in conjunction with the i_nlink field in the inode to
125determine the lifetime of the inode in question. Locking of inodes
126is on a per-inode basis. Locking of rgrps is on a per rgrp basis.
127In general we prefer to lock local locks prior to cluster locks.
128
129Glock Statistics
130----------------
131
132The stats are divided into two sets: those relating to the
133super block and those relating to an individual glock. The
134super block stats are done on a per cpu basis in order to
135try and reduce the overhead of gathering them. They are also
136further divided by glock type. All timings are in nanoseconds.
137
138In the case of both the super block and glock statistics,
139the same information is gathered in each case. The super
140block timing statistics are used to provide default values for
141the glock timing statistics, so that newly created glocks
142should have, as far as possible, a sensible starting point.
143The per-glock counters are initialised to zero when the
144glock is created. The per-glock statistics are lost when
145the glock is ejected from memory.
146
147The statistics are divided into three pairs of mean and
148variance, plus two counters. The mean/variance pairs are
149smoothed exponential estimates and the algorithm used is
150one which will be very familiar to those used to calculation
151of round trip times in network code. See "TCP/IP Illustrated,
152Volume 1", W. Richard Stevens, sect 21.3, "Round-Trip Time Measurement",
153p. 299 and onwards. Also, Volume 2, Sect. 25.10, p. 838 and onwards.
154Unlike the TCP/IP Illustrated case, the mean and variance are
155not scaled, but are in units of integer nanoseconds.
156
157The three pairs of mean/variance measure the following
158things:
159
160 1. DLM lock time (non-blocking requests)
161 2. DLM lock time (blocking requests)
162 3. Inter-request time (again to the DLM)
163
164A non-blocking request is one which will complete right
165away, whatever the state of the DLM lock in question. That
166currently means any requests when (a) the current state of
167the lock is exclusive, i.e. a lock demotion (b) the requested
168state is either null or unlocked (again, a demotion) or (c) the
169"try lock" flag is set. A blocking request covers all the other
170lock requests.
171
172There are two counters. The first is there primarily to show
173how many lock requests have been made, and thus how much data
174has gone into the mean/variance calculations. The other counter
175is counting queuing of holders at the top layer of the glock
176code. Hopefully that number will be a lot larger than the number
177of dlm lock requests issued.
178
179So why gather these statistics? There are several reasons
180we'd like to get a better idea of these timings:
181
1821. To be able to better set the glock "min hold time"
1832. To spot performance issues more easily
1843. To improve the algorithm for selecting resource groups for
185   allocation (to base it on lock wait time, rather than blindly
186   using a "try lock")
187
188Due to the smoothing action of the updates, a step change in
189some input quantity being sampled will only fully be taken
190into account after 8 samples (or 4 for the variance) and this
191needs to be carefully considered when interpreting the
192results.
193
194Knowing both the time it takes a lock request to complete and
195the average time between lock requests for a glock means we
196can compute the total percentage of the time for which the
197node is able to use a glock vs. time that the rest of the
198cluster has its share. That will be very useful when setting
199the lock min hold time.
200
201Great care has been taken to ensure that we
202measure exactly the quantities that we want, as accurately
203as possible. There are always inaccuracies in any
204measuring system, but I hope this is as accurate as we
205can reasonably make it.
206
207Per sb stats can be found here::
208
209    /sys/kernel/debug/gfs2/<fsname>/sbstats
210
211Per glock stats can be found here::
212
213    /sys/kernel/debug/gfs2/<fsname>/glstats
214
215Assuming that debugfs is mounted on /sys/kernel/debug and also
216that <fsname> is replaced with the name of the gfs2 filesystem
217in question.
218
219The abbreviations used in the output as are follows:
220
221=========  ================================================================
222srtt       Smoothed round trip time for non blocking dlm requests
223srttvar    Variance estimate for srtt
224srttb      Smoothed round trip time for (potentially) blocking dlm requests
225srttvarb   Variance estimate for srttb
226sirt       Smoothed inter request time (for dlm requests)
227sirtvar    Variance estimate for sirt
228dlm        Number of dlm requests made (dcnt in glstats file)
229queue      Number of glock requests queued (qcnt in glstats file)
230=========  ================================================================
231
232The sbstats file contains a set of these stats for each glock type (so 8 lines
233for each type) and for each cpu (one column per cpu). The glstats file contains
234a set of these stats for each glock in a similar format to the glocks file, but
235using the format mean/variance for each of the timing stats.
236
237The gfs2_glock_lock_time tracepoint prints out the current values of the stats
238for the glock in question, along with some addition information on each dlm
239reply that is received:
240
241======   =======================================
242status   The status of the dlm request
243flags    The dlm request flags
244tdiff    The time taken by this specific request
245======   =======================================
246
247(remaining fields as per above list)
248
249
250