Re: [PATCH 2/2] ext4: flush delalloc blocks when space is low

[tytso@mit.edu]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 09:46:02PM +0100, Jan Kara wrote:
> > Creating many small files in rapid succession on a small
> > filesystem can lead to spurious ENOSPC; on a 104MB filesystem:
> > 
> > for i in `seq 1 22500`; do
> >     echo -n > $SCRATCH_MNT/$i
> >     echo XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX > $SCRATCH_MNT/$i
> > done
> > 
> > leads to ENOSPC even though after a sync, 40% of the fs is free
> > again.
> > 
> > This is because we reserve worst-case metadata for delalloc writes,
> > and when data is allocated that worst-case reservation is not
> > usually needed.
> > 
> > When freespace is low, kicking off an async writeback will start
> > converting that worst-case space usage into something more realistic,
> > almost always freeing up space to continue.
> > 
> > This resolves the testcase for me, and survives all 4 generic
> > ENOSPC tests in xfstests.
> > 
> > We'll still need a hard synchronous sync to squeeze out the last bit,
> > but this fixes things up to a large degree.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com>

Thanks, added to the ext4 patch queue.

						- Ted