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  • Fengguang Wu's avatar
    writeback: introduce writeback_control.more_io to indicate more io · 2e6883bd
    Fengguang Wu authored
    
    
    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>
    2e6883bd