• Andrew Morton's avatar
    writeback: fix time ordering of the per superblock dirty inode lists 6 · 65cb9b47
    Andrew Morton authored
    Recycling the previous changelog:
    
      When the writeback function is operating in writeback-for-flushing mode
      (as opposed to writeback-for-integrity) and it encounters an I_LOCKed inode,
      it will skip writing that inode.  This is done for throughput and latency:
      move on to another inode rather than blocking for this one.
    
      Writeback skips this inode by moving it off s_io and onto s_dirty, so that
      writeback can proceed with the other inodes on s_io.
    
      However that inode movement can corrupt s_dirty's
      reverse-time-orderedness.  Fix that by using the new redirty_tail(), which
      will update the refiled inode's dirtied_when field.
    
      Note: the behaviour in here is a bit rude: if kupdate happens to come
      across a locked inode then it will defer writeback of that inode for another
      30 seconds.  We'll address that in the next patch.
    
    Address that here.  What we do is to move the skipped inode to the _head_ of
    s_dirty, immediately eligible for writeout again.  Instead of deferring that
    writeout for another 30 seconds.
    
    One would think that this might cause a livelock: we keep on trying to write
    the same locked inode.  But it won't because:
    
    a) if that was the case, it would _already_ be happening on the
       balance_dirty_pages codepath.  Because balance_dirty_pages() doesn't care
       about inode timestamps.
    
    b) if we skipped this inode then we won't have done any writeback.  The
       higher-level writeback paths will see that wbc.nr_to_write didn't change
       and they'll then back off and take a nap.
    
    Cc: Mike Waychison <mikew@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    65cb9b47
fs-writeback.c 22.1 KB