linux-toradex.git/include/linux/writeback.h, branch tegra-10.9.9

sysctl: remove "struct file *" argument of ->proc_handler

2009-09-24T14:21:04+00:00

It's unused.

It isn't needed -- read or write flag is already passed and sysctl
shouldn't care about the rest.

It _was_ used in two places at arch/frv for some reason.

Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan 
Cc: David Howells 
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" 
Cc: Al Viro 
Cc: Ralf Baechle 
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky 
Cc: Ingo Molnar 
Cc: "David S. Miller" 
Cc: James Morris 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: separate starting of sync vs opportunistic writeback

2009-09-16T13:18:52+00:00

bdi_start_writeback() is currently split into two paths, one for
WB_SYNC_NONE and one for WB_SYNC_ALL. Add bdi_sync_writeback()
for WB_SYNC_ALL writeback and let bdi_start_writeback() handle
only WB_SYNC_NONE.

Push down the writeback_control allocation and only accept the
parameters that make sense for each function. This cleans up
the API considerably.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: get rid of wbc->for_writepages

2009-09-16T13:16:18+00:00

It's only set, it's never checked. Kill it.

Acked-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

vfs: Remove generic_osync_inode() and sync_page_range{_nolock}()

2009-09-14T15:08:17+00:00

Remove these three functions since nobody uses them anymore.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara

writeback: get rid of pdflush completely

2009-09-11T07:20:25+00:00

It is now unused, so kill it off.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: switch to per-bdi threads for flushing data

2009-09-11T07:20:25+00:00

This gets rid of pdflush for bdi writeout and kupdated style cleaning.
pdflush writeout suffers from lack of locality and also requires more
threads to handle the same workload, since it has to work in a
non-blocking fashion against each queue. This also introduces lumpy
behaviour and potential request starvation, since pdflush can be starved
for queue access if others are accessing it. A sample ffsb workload that
does random writes to files is about 8% faster here on a simple SATA drive
during the benchmark phase. File layout also seems a LOT more smooth in
vmstat:

 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 0  1      0 608848   2652 375372    0    0     0 71024  604    24  1 10 48 42
 0  1      0 549644   2712 433736    0    0     0 60692  505    27  1  8 48 44
 1  0      0 476928   2784 505192    0    0     4 29540  553    24  0  9 53 37
 0  1      0 457972   2808 524008    0    0     0 54876  331    16  0  4 38 58
 0  1      0 366128   2928 614284    0    0     4 92168  710    58  0 13 53 34
 0  1      0 295092   3000 684140    0    0     0 62924  572    23  0  9 53 37
 0  1      0 236592   3064 741704    0    0     4 58256  523    17  0  8 48 44
 0  1      0 165608   3132 811464    0    0     0 57460  560    21  0  8 54 38
 0  1      0 102952   3200 873164    0    0     4 74748  540    29  1 10 48 41
 0  1      0  48604   3252 926472    0    0     0 53248  469    29  0  7 47 45

where vanilla tends to fluctuate a lot in the creation phase:

 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 1  1      0 678716   5792 303380    0    0     0 74064  565    50  1 11 52 36
 1  0      0 662488   5864 319396    0    0     4   352  302   329  0  2 47 51
 0  1      0 599312   5924 381468    0    0     0 78164  516    55  0  9 51 40
 0  1      0 519952   6008 459516    0    0     4 78156  622    56  1 11 52 37
 1  1      0 436640   6092 541632    0    0     0 82244  622    54  0 11 48 41
 0  1      0 436640   6092 541660    0    0     0     8  152    39  0  0 51 49
 0  1      0 332224   6200 644252    0    0     4 102800  728    46  1 13 49 36
 1  0      0 274492   6260 701056    0    0     4 12328  459    49  0  7 50 43
 0  1      0 211220   6324 763356    0    0     0 106940  515    37  1 10 51 39
 1  0      0 160412   6376 813468    0    0     0  8224  415    43  0  6 49 45
 1  1      0  85980   6452 886556    0    0     4 113516  575    39  1 11 54 34
 0  2      0  85968   6452 886620    0    0     0  1640  158   211  0  0 46 54

A 10 disk test with btrfs performs 26% faster with per-bdi flushing. A
SSD based writeback test on XFS performs over 20% better as well, with
the throughput being very stable around 1GB/sec, where pdflush only
manages 750MB/sec and fluctuates wildly while doing so. Random buffered
writes to many files behave a lot better as well, as does random mmap'ed
writes.

A separate thread is added to sync the super blocks. In the long term,
adding sync_supers_bdi() functionality could get rid of this thread again.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

writeback: get rid of generic_sync_sb_inodes() export

2009-09-11T07:20:25+00:00

This adds two new exported functions:

- writeback_inodes_sb(), which only attempts to writeback dirty inodes on
  this super_block, for WB_SYNC_NONE writeout.
- sync_inodes_sb(), which writes out all dirty inodes on this super_block
  and also waits for the IO to complete.

Acked-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

vfs: Make sys_sync() use fsync_super() (version 4)

2009-06-12T01:36:03+00:00

It is unnecessarily fragile to have two places (fsync_super() and do_sync())
doing data integrity sync of the filesystem. Alter __fsync_super() to
accommodate needs of both callers and use it. So after this patch
__fsync_super() is the only place where we gather all the calls needed to
properly send all data on a filesystem to disk.

Nice bonus is that we get a complete livelock avoidance and write_supers()
is now only used for periodic writeback of superblocks.

sync_blockdevs() introduced a couple of patches ago is gone now.

[build fixes folded]

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

Revert "mm: add /proc controls for pdflush threads"

2009-05-15T09:32:24+00:00

This reverts commit fafd688e4c0c34da0f3de909881117d374e4c7af.

Work is progressing to switch away from pdflush as the process backing
for flushing out dirty data. So it seems pointless to add more knobs
to control pdflush threads. The original author of the patch did not
have any specific use cases for adding the knobs, so we can easily
revert this before 2.6.30 to avoid having to maintain this API
forever.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe

mm: add /proc controls for pdflush threads

2009-04-07T15:31:03+00:00

Add /proc entries to give the admin the ability to control the minimum and
maximum number of pdflush threads.  This allows finer control of pdflush
on both large and small machines.

The rationale is simply one size does not fit all.  Admins on large and/or
small systems may want to tune the min/max pdflush thread count to best
suit their needs.  Right now the min/max is hardcoded to 2/8.  While
probably a fair estimate for smaller machines, large machines with large
numbers of CPUs and large numbers of filesystems/block devices may benefit
from larger numbers of threads working on different block devices.

Even if the background flushing algorithm is radically changed, it is
still likely that multiple threads will be involved and admins would still
desire finer control on the min/max other than to have to recompile the
kernel.

The patch adds '/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_min' and
'/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads_max' with r/w permissions.

The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_min is 1 and the maximum value is
the current value of nr_pdflush_threads_max.  This minimum is required
since additional thread creation is performed in a pdflush thread itself.

The minimum value for nr_pdflush_threads_max is the current value of
nr_pdflush_threads_min and the maximum value can be 1000.

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt is also updated.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment, fix whitespace, use __read_mostly]
Signed-off-by: Peter W Morreale 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds