linux-toradex.git/fs/fs-writeback.c, branch v3.0.16

writeback: update dirtied_when for synced inode to prevent livelock

2011-10-03T18:40:44+00:00

commit 94c3dcbb0b0cdfd82cedd21705424d8044edc42c upstream.

Explicitly update .dirtied_when on synced inodes, so that they are no
longer considered for writeback in the next round.

It can prevent both of the following livelock schemes:

- while true; do echo data >> f; done
- while true; do touch f;        done (in theory)

The exact livelock condition is, during sync(1):

(1) no new inodes are dirtied
(2) an inode being actively dirtied

On (2), the inode will be tagged and synced with .nr_to_write=LONG_MAX.
When finished, it will be redirty_tail()ed because it's still dirty
and (.nr_to_write > 0). redirty_tail() won't update its ->dirtied_when
on condition (1). The sync work will then revisit it on the next
queue_io() and find it eligible again because its old ->dirtied_when
predates the sync work start time.

We'll do more aggressive "keep writeback as long as we wrote something"
logic in wb_writeback(). The "use LONG_MAX .nr_to_write" trick in commit
b9543dac5bbc ("writeback: avoid livelocking WB_SYNC_ALL writeback") will
no longer be enough to stop sync livelock.

Reviewed-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

writeback: introduce .tagged_writepages for the WB_SYNC_NONE sync stage

2011-10-03T18:40:43+00:00

commit 6e6938b6d3130305a5960c86b1a9b21e58cf6144 upstream.

sync(2) is performed in two stages: the WB_SYNC_NONE sync and the
WB_SYNC_ALL sync. Identify the first stage with .tagged_writepages and
do livelock prevention for it, too.

Jan's commit f446daaea9 ("mm: implement writeback livelock avoidance
using page tagging") is a partial fix in that it only fixed the
WB_SYNC_ALL phase livelock.

Although ext4 is tested to no longer livelock with commit f446daaea9,
it may due to some "redirty_tail() after pages_skipped" effect which
is by no means a guarantee for _all_ the file systems.

Note that writeback_inodes_sb() is called by not only sync(), they are
treated the same because the other callers also need livelock prevention.

Impact:  It changes the order in which pages/inodes are synced to disk.
Now in the WB_SYNC_NONE stage, it won't proceed to write the next inode
until finished with the current inode.

Acked-by: Jan Kara 
CC: Dave Chinner 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang 
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

fs: pass exact type of data dirties to ->dirty_inode

2011-05-27T11:04:40+00:00

Tell the filesystem if we just updated timestamp (I_DIRTY_SYNC) or
anything else, so that the filesystem can track internally if it
needs to push out a transaction for fdatasync or not.

This is just the prototype change with no user for it yet.  I plan
to push large XFS changes for the next merge window, and getting
this trivial infrastructure in this window would help a lot to avoid
tree interdependencies.

Also remove incorrect comments that ->dirty_inode can't block.  That
has been changed a long time ago, and many implementations rely on it.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

Fix common misspellings

2011-03-31T14:26:23+00:00

Fixes generated by 'codespell' and manually reviewed.

Signed-off-by: Lucas De Marchi

fs: pull inode->i_lock up out of writeback_single_inode

2011-03-25T01:17:51+00:00

First thing we do in writeback_single_inode() is take the i_lock and
the last thing we do is drop it. A caller already holds the i_lock,
so pull the i_lock out of writeback_single_inode() to reduce the
round trips on this lock during inode writeback.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

fs: move i_wb_list out from under inode_lock

2011-03-25T01:17:51+00:00

Protect the inode writeback list with a new global lock
inode_wb_list_lock and use it to protect the list manipulations and
traversals. This lock replaces the inode_lock as the inodes on the
list can be validity checked while holding the inode->i_lock and
hence the inode_lock is no longer needed to protect the list.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

fs: move i_sb_list out from under inode_lock

2011-03-25T01:16:32+00:00

Protect the per-sb inode list with a new global lock
inode_sb_list_lock and use it to protect the list manipulations and
traversals. This lock replaces the inode_lock as the inodes on the
list can be validity checked while holding the inode->i_lock and
hence the inode_lock is no longer needed to protect the list.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

fs: protect inode->i_state with inode->i_lock

2011-03-25T01:16:31+00:00

Protect inode state transitions and validity checks with the
inode->i_lock. This enables us to make inode state transitions
independently of the inode_lock and is the first step to peeling
away the inode_lock from the code.

This requires that __iget() is done atomically with i_state checks
during list traversals so that we don't race with another thread
marking the inode I_FREEING between the state check and grabbing the
reference.

Also remove the unlock_new_inode() memory barrier optimisation
required to avoid taking the inode_lock when clearing I_NEW.
Simplify the code by simply taking the inode->i_lock around the
state change and wakeup. Because the wakeup is no longer tricky,
remove the wake_up_inode() function and open code the wakeup where
necessary.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

fs/fs-writeback.c: fix sync_inodes_sb() return value kernel-doc

2011-01-14T01:32:48+00:00

The sync_inodes_sb() function does not have a return value.  Remove the
outdated documentation comment.

Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

sync_inode_metadata: fix comment

2011-01-14T01:32:32+00:00

Use correct function name, remove incorrect apostrophe

Cc: Christoph Hellwig 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds