Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 11 May 2004 13:11:24 -0600 | From | marcus hall <> | Subject | Block device swamping disk cache |
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I am having problems writing a filesystem image to a device file.
I am running an arm version of the 2.5.59 kernel.
Writing the data to the device file eventually caused ps.nr_dirty to exceed dirty_thresh in balance_dirty_pages(), yet when writeback_inodes() scans all the superblocks, the inodes that it finds are all marked as memory_backed (they are on a ramdisk), and the inode for the block device file doesn't show up.
I did not see any place where mark_inode_dirty() gets called for the block device.. Is there some other mechanism for flushing the disk cache allocated to the device? I end up with balance_dirty_pages() looping forever.
Just for grins, I added a call to mark_inode_dirty() in blkdev_commit_write() (similar to generic_commit_write()), but this had no effect that I could notice. I did note that in blkdev_commit_write(), if I look at file->f_dentry->d_inode, I see the inode form the /dev filesystem, yet page->mapping->host is a different inode! I don't know if this is a problem or not, but it did surprise me..
Anyhow, is this a known issue with 2.5.59? How is the disk cache allocated to a block device supposed to get flushed?
Thanks!
Marcus Hall marcus@tuells.org - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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