[PATCH 1/2] writeback: Improve busyloop prevention

From: Jan Kara
Date: Wed Oct 05 2011 - 13:58:56 EST


Writeback of an inode can be stalled by things like internal fs locks being
held. So in case we didn't write anything during a pass through b_io list,
just wait for a moment and try again.

CC: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
---
fs/fs-writeback.c | 26 ++++++++++++++------------
1 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c
index 04cf3b9..bdeb26a 100644
--- a/fs/fs-writeback.c
+++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c
@@ -699,8 +699,8 @@ static long wb_writeback(struct bdi_writeback *wb,
unsigned long wb_start = jiffies;
long nr_pages = work->nr_pages;
unsigned long oldest_jif;
- struct inode *inode;
long progress;
+ long pause = 1;

oldest_jif = jiffies;
work->older_than_this = &oldest_jif;
@@ -755,25 +755,27 @@ static long wb_writeback(struct bdi_writeback *wb,
* mean the overall work is done. So we keep looping as long
* as made some progress on cleaning pages or inodes.
*/
- if (progress)
+ if (progress) {
+ pause = 1;
continue;
+ }
/*
* No more inodes for IO, bail
*/
if (list_empty(&wb->b_more_io))
break;
/*
- * Nothing written. Wait for some inode to
- * become available for writeback. Otherwise
- * we'll just busyloop.
+ * Nothing written (some internal fs locks were unavailable or
+ * inode was under writeback from balance_dirty_pages() or
+ * similar conditions). Wait for a while to avoid busylooping.
*/
- if (!list_empty(&wb->b_more_io)) {
- trace_writeback_wait(wb->bdi, work);
- inode = wb_inode(wb->b_more_io.prev);
- spin_lock(&inode->i_lock);
- inode_wait_for_writeback(inode, wb);
- spin_unlock(&inode->i_lock);
- }
+ trace_writeback_wait(wb->bdi, work);
+ spin_unlock(&wb->list_lock);
+ __set_current_state(TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE);
+ schedule_timeout(pause);
+ if (pause < HZ / 10)
+ pause <<= 1;
+ spin_lock(&wb->list_lock);
}
spin_unlock(&wb->list_lock);

--
1.7.1

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