Re: [patch 6/6] mm: fsync livelock avoidance

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:42:09 +0100
Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de> wrote:

> This patch fixes fsync starvation problems in the presence of concurrent
> dirtiers.

One reject in xfs, which now does:

int
xfs_flush_pages(
	xfs_inode_t	*ip,
	xfs_off_t	first,
	xfs_off_t	last,
	uint64_t	flags,
	int		fiopt)
{
	struct address_space *mapping = VFS_I(ip)->i_mapping;
	int		ret = 0;
	int		ret2;

	if (mapping_tagged(mapping, PAGECACHE_TAG_DIRTY)) {
		xfs_iflags_clear(ip, XFS_ITRUNCATED);
		ret = filemap_fdatawrite(mapping);
		if (flags & XFS_B_ASYNC)
			return -ret;
		ret2 = filemap_fdatawait(mapping);
		if (!ret)
			ret = ret2;
	}
	return -ret;
}

ie: it returns a +ve integer on error, heaven knows why.

So I did

int
xfs_flush_pages(
	xfs_inode_t	*ip,
	xfs_off_t	first,
	xfs_off_t	last,
	uint64_t	flags,
	int		fiopt)
{
	struct address_space *mapping = VFS_I(ip)->i_mapping;
	int		ret = 0;

	if (mapping_tagged(mapping, PAGECACHE_TAG_DIRTY)) {
		xfs_iflags_clear(ip, XFS_ITRUNCATED);
		if (flags & XFS_B_ASYNC) {
			ret = __filemap_fdatawrite_range(mapping,
					0, LLONG_MAX, WB_SYNC_NONE);
		} else {
			int ret2;

			mapping_fsync_lock(mapping);
			ret = filemap_fdatawrite(mapping);
			ret2 = filemap_fdatawait_fsync(mapping);
			if (!ret)
				ret = ret2;
			mapping_fsync_unlock(mapping);
		}
	}
	return -ret;
}