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Commit 2e6883bd authored by Fengguang Wu's avatar Fengguang Wu Committed by Linus Torvalds
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writeback: introduce writeback_control.more_io to indicate more io



After making dirty a 100M file, the normal behavior is to start the writeback
for all data after 30s delays.  But sometimes the following happens instead:

	- after 30s:    ~4M
	- after 5s:     ~4M
	- after 5s:     all remaining 92M

Some analyze shows that the internal io dispatch queues goes like this:

		s_io            s_more_io
		-------------------------
	1)	100M,1K         0
	2)	1K              96M
	3)	0               96M

1) initial state with a 100M file and a 1K file
2) 4M written, nr_to_write <= 0, so write more
3) 1K written, nr_to_write > 0, no more writes(BUG)

nr_to_write > 0 in (3) fools the upper layer to think that data have all been
written out.  The big dirty file is actually still sitting in s_more_io.  We
cannot simply splice s_more_io back to s_io as soon as s_io becomes empty, and
let the loop in generic_sync_sb_inodes() continue: this may starve newly
expired inodes in s_dirty.  It is also not an option to draw inodes from both
s_more_io and s_dirty, an let the loop go on: this might lead to live locks,
and might also starve other superblocks in sync time(well kupdate may still
starve some superblocks, that's another bug).

We have to return when a full scan of s_io completes.  So nr_to_write > 0 does
not necessarily mean that "all data are written".  This patch introduces a
flag writeback_control.more_io to indicate this situation.  With it the big
dirty file no longer has to wait for the next kupdate invocation 5s later.

Cc: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: Ken Chen <kenchen@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarFengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 1f7decf6
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