There's an inherent mismatch between memcg and writeback. The former
trackes ownership per-page while the latter per-inode. This was a
deliberate design decision because honoring per-page ownership in the
writeback path is complicated, may lead to higher CPU and IO overheads
and deemed unnecessary given that write-sharing an inode across
different cgroups isn't a common use-case.
Combined with inode majority-writer ownership switching, this works
well enough in most cases but there are some pathological cases. For
example, let's say there are two cgroups A and B which keep writing to
different but confined parts of the same inode. B owns the inode and
A's memory is limited far below B's. A's dirty ratio can rise enough
to trigger balance_dirty_pages() sleeps but B's can be low enough to
avoid triggering background writeback. A will be slowed down without
a way to make writeback of the dirty pages happen.
This patch implements foreign dirty recording and foreign mechanism so
that when a memcg encounters a condition as above it can trigger
flushes on bdi_writebacks which can clean its pages. Please see the
comment on top of mem_cgroup_track_foreign_dirty_slowpath() for
details.