writeback: fix possible underflow in write bandwidth calculation

htejun · axboe · commit c72efb658f7c · 2015-03-23T09:35:58.000-06:00
From 1ebf339 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 00:08:19 -0400 2f800fb ("writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirty") introduced account_page_redirty() which reverts stat updates for a redirtied page, making BDI_DIRTIED no longer monotonically increasing. bdi_update_write_bandwidth() uses the delta in BDI_DIRTIED as the basis for bandwidth calculation. While unlikely, since the above patch, the newer value may be lower than the recorded past value and underflow the bandwidth calculation leading to a wild result. Fix it by subtracing min of the old and new values when calculating delta. AFAIK, there hasn't been any report of it happening but the resulting erratic behavior would be non-critical and temporary, so it's possible that the issue is happening without being reported. The risk of the fix is very low, so tagged for -stable. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com> Fixes: 2f800fb ("writeback: fix dirtied pages accounting on redirty") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -857,8 +857,11 @@ static void bdi_update_write_bandwidth(struct backing_dev_info *bdi,
 	 *                   bw * elapsed + write_bandwidth * (period - elapsed)
 	 * write_bandwidth = ---------------------------------------------------
 	 *                                          period
+	 *
+	 * @written may have decreased due to account_page_redirty().
+	 * Avoid underflowing @bw calculation.
 	 */
-	bw = written - bdi->written_stamp;
+	bw = written - min(written, bdi->written_stamp);
 	bw *= HZ;
 	if (unlikely(elapsed > period)) {
 		do_div(bw, elapsed);
