Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:32:36 +0800 | From | Wu Fengguang <> | Subject | Re: regression in page writeback |
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On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 09:28:32AM +0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:17:58 +0800 Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> wrote: > > > On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 08:54:52AM +0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > On Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:22:20 +0800 Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> wrote: > > > > > > > Jens' per-bdi writeback has another improvement. In 2.6.31, when > > > > superblocks A and B both have 100000 dirty pages, it will first > > > > exhaust A's 100000 dirty pages before going on to sync B's. > > > > > > That would only be true if someone broke 2.6.31. Did they? > > > > > > SYSCALL_DEFINE0(sync) > > > { > > > wakeup_pdflush(0); > > > sync_filesystems(0); > > > sync_filesystems(1); > > > if (unlikely(laptop_mode)) > > > laptop_sync_completion(); > > > return 0; > > > } > > > > > > the sync_filesystems(0) is supposed to non-blockingly start IO against > > > all devices. It used to do that correctly. But people mucked with it > > > so perhaps it no longer does. > > > > I'm referring to writeback_inodes(). Each invocation of which (to sync > > 4MB) will do the same iteration over superblocks A => B => C ... So if > > A has dirty pages, it will always be served first. > > > > So if wbc->bdi == NULL (which is true for kupdate/background sync), it > > will have to first exhaust A before going on to B and C. > > But that works OK. We fill the first device's queue, then it gets > congested and sync_sb_inodes() does nothing and we advance to the next > queue. > > If a device has more than a queue's worth of dirty data then we'll > probably leave some of that dirty memory un-queued, so there's some > lack of concurrency in that situation.
Yes, exactly if block device is not fast enough. In that case balance_dirty_pages() may also kick in with non-NULL bdi.
Thanks, Fengguang
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