Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:28:07 +0800 | From | Fengguang Wu <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] A deadlock free and best try version of drop_caches() |
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On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 09:03:18AM +1100, David Chinner wrote: > On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 07:27:29PM +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:28:44PM +1100, David Chinner wrote: > > > Looks like everything is backed up on the inode_lock. Why? Looks > > > like drop_pagecache_sb() is doing something ..... suboptimal. > ...... > > > Anyone know the reason why drop_pagecache_sb() uses such a brute-force > > > mechanism to free up clean page cache pages? > > > > Because extensive use of it(out of testings) is discouraged? ;-) > > > > I have been running a longer but safer version, let's merge it? > > So you walk the inode hash to find inodes? Seems like a nice idea on > the surface.... Won't it need to hold the iprune_mutex to prevent > races with prune_icache() and invalidate_list()?
Oh, I didn't notice iprune_mutex :-/
> Hmmmm - what about unhashed inodes? We'll never see them with this > method of traversal. I ask because I'm working on some prototype > patches for XFS that avoid using the inode hash altogether and drive > inode lookup from the multitude of radix trees we have per filesystem > (for parallelised and lockless inode lookup). > > The above scanning method would not work at all with that sort of > filesystem structure. Perhaps combining the bulk get/put with Jan's > get/put method for walking the sb inode list would be sufficient?
You mean to move __invalidate_mapping_pages() out of inode_lock in drop_pagecache_sb()? Sounds reasonable.
BTW, I noticed the following comments on locking order are outdated:
filemap.c * ->inode_lock * ->sb_lock (fs/fs-writeback.c)
rmap.c * sb_lock (within inode_lock in fs/fs-writeback.c)
They are invalidated by this patch: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/old-2.6-bkcvs.git;a=commit;h=03da8814512f55441b9bd57c1ceddd28fbcf59ba [PATCH] Rearrangement of inode_lock in writeback_inodes()
[...] It narrows down use of inode_lock and removes unneccassary nesting of sb_lock and inode_lock. [...]
Thank you, Fengguang
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