xfs: log IO completion workqueue is a high priority queue

The workqueue implementation in 2.6.36-rcX has changed, resulting
in the workqueues no longer having dedicated threads for work
processing. This has caused severe livelocks under heavy parallel
create workloads because the log IO completions have been getting
held up behind metadata IO completions.  Hence log commits would
stall, memory allocation would stall because pages could not be
cleaned, and lock contention on the AIL during inode IO completion
processing was being seen to slow everything down even further.

By making the log Io completion workqueue a high priority workqueue,
they are queued ahead of all data/metadata IO completions and
processed before the data/metadata completions. Hence the log never
gets stalled, and operations needed to clean memory can continue as
quickly as possible. This avoids the livelock conditions and allos
the system to keep running under heavy load as per normal.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_buf.c b/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_buf.c
index d72cf2b..286e36e 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_buf.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_buf.c
@@ -1932,7 +1932,8 @@ xfs_buf_init(void)
 	if (!xfs_buf_zone)
 		goto out;
 
-	xfslogd_workqueue = create_workqueue("xfslogd");
+	xfslogd_workqueue = alloc_workqueue("xfslogd",
+					WQ_RESCUER | WQ_HIGHPRI, 1);
 	if (!xfslogd_workqueue)
 		goto out_free_buf_zone;