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Andrew Morton authored
The key concept here is that pdflush does not block on request queues any more. Instead, it circulates across the queues, keeping any non-congested queues full of write data. When all queues are full, pdflush takes a nap, to be woken when *any* queue exits write congestion. This code can keep sixty spindles saturated - we've never been able to do that before. - Add the `nonblocking' flag to struct writeback_control, and teach the writeback paths to honour it. - Add the `encountered_congestion' flag to struct writeback_control and teach the writeback paths to set it. So as soon as a mapping's backing_dev_info indicates that it is getting congested, bale out of writeback. And don't even start writeback against filesystems whose queues are congested. - Convert pdflush's background_writeback() function to use nonblocking writeback. This way, a single pdflush thread will circulate around all the dirty queues, keeping them filled. - Convert the pdlfush `kupdate' function to do the same thing. This solves the problem of pdflush thread pool exhaustion. It solves the problem of pdflush startup latency. It solves the (minor) problem wherein `kupdate' writeback only writes back a single disk at a time (it was getting blocked on each queue in turn). It probably means that we only ever need a single pdflush thread.
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