Re: [PATCH 3/6] writeback: make nr_to_write a per-file limit

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Wed May 04 2011 - 12:18:29 EST


> - move MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES and wb_writeback_work definitions to writeback.h

I think it would be a good idea to keep this in fs/fs-writeback.c, which
means we'd need a small writeback_inodes_wb wrapper for
balance_dirty_pages and bdi_flush_io. But IIRC your tree already has
__writeback_inodes_wb for use in wb_writeback, so writeback_inodes_wb
could be that wrapper.

> + long write_chunk = MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES;
> + long wrote = 0;
> + bool inode_cleaned = false;
> +
> + /*
> + * WB_SYNC_ALL mode does livelock avoidance by syncing dirty
> + * inodes/pages in one big loop. Setting wbc.nr_to_write=LONG_MAX
> + * here avoids calling into writeback_inodes_wb() more than once.
> + *
> + * The intended call sequence for WB_SYNC_ALL writeback is:
> + *
> + * wb_writeback()
> + * writeback_sb_inodes() <== called only once
> + * write_cache_pages() <== called once for each inode
> + * (quickly) tag currently dirty pages
> + * (maybe slowly) sync all tagged pages
> + */
> + if (work->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL || work->tagged_sync)
> + write_chunk = LONG_MAX;

I think this would be easier to read if kept as and if / else clause
with the MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES usage.

> + write_chunk = min(write_chunk, work->nr_pages);

Or in fact done here - for the WB_SYNC_ALL case LONG_MAX should
always be larger than work->nr_pages, so the whole thing could be
simplified to:

if (work->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL || work->tagged_sync)
write_chunk = LONG_MAX;
else
write_chunk = min(MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES, work->nr_pages);


Other notes:

- older_than_this in writeback_control shouldn't be needed anymore
- is the early return for the mis-matching sb in writeback_sb_inodes
handled correctly? Before it had the special 0 return value, and
I'm not quite sure how that fits into your new enum scheme.
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