Re: Disabling in-memory write cache for x86-64 in Linux II

From: Jan Kara
Date: Tue Oct 29 2013 - 16:58:09 EST


On Fri 25-10-13 10:32:16, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Andrew Morton
> <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Apparently all this stuff isn't working as desired (and perhaps as designed)
> > in this case. Will take a look after a return to normalcy ;)
>
> It definitely doesn't work. I can trivially reproduce problems by just
> having a cheap (==slow) USB key with an ext3 filesystem, and going a
> git clone to it. The end result is not pretty, and that's actually not
> even a huge amount of data.
I'll try to reproduce this tomorrow so that I can have a look where
exactly are we stuck. But in last few releases problems like this were
caused by problems in reclaim which got fed up by seeing lots of dirty
/ under writeback pages and ended up stuck waiting for IO to finish. Mel
has been tweaking the logic here and there but maybe it haven't got fixed
completely. Mel, do you know about any outstanding issues?

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
SUSE Labs, CR
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