prctl: PR_{G,S}ET_IO_FLUSHER to support controlling memory reclaim
There are several storage drivers like dm-multipath, iscsi, tcmu-runner, amd nbd that have userspace components that can run in the IO path. For example, iscsi and nbd's userspace deamons may need to recreate a socket and/or send IO on it, and dm-multipath's daemon multipathd may need to send SG IO or read/write IO to figure out the state of paths and re-set them up. In the kernel these drivers have access to GFP_NOIO/GFP_NOFS and the memalloc_*_save/restore functions to control the allocation behavior, but for userspace we would end up hitting an allocation that ended up writing data back to the same device we are trying to allocate for. The device is then in a state of deadlock, because to execute IO the device needs to allocate memory, but to allocate memory the memory layers want execute IO to the device. Here is an example with nbd using a local userspace daemon that performs network IO to a remote server. We are using XFS on top of...
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