Re: [PATCH 2/5] writeback: stop periodic/background work on seeing sync works

[Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>]

On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 09:44:31PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 09:22:16PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > > >   Fengguang, how about merging also the attached simple patch together with
> > > > my fix? With these two patches, I'm not able to trigger any sync livelock
> > > > while without one of them I hit them quite easily...
> > > 
> > > This looks OK. However note that redirty_tail() can modify
> > > dirtied_when unexpectedly. So the more we rely on wb_start, the more
> > > possibility an inode is (wrongly) skipped by sync. I have a bunch of
> > > patches to remove redirty_tail(). However they may not be good
> > > candidates for 2.6.36..
> > 
> > It looks that setting wb_start at the beginning of
> > writeback_inodes_wb() won't be easily affected by redirty_tail().
> 
> Except for this redirty_tail(), which may mess up the dirtied_when
> ordering in b_dirty and later on break the assumption of
> inode_dirtied_after(inode, wbc->wb_start).

Oh well, it seems still OK (it does sound crazy). Please ignore the
below patch, sorry for the noise..

Thanks,
Fengguang

> It can be replaced by a requeue_io() for now.  Christoph mentioned a
> patchset to introduce sb->s_wb, which should be a better solution.
> 
> Thanks,
> Fengguang
> 
> diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c
> index a178828..e56e68b 100644
> --- a/fs/fs-writeback.c
> +++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c
> @@ -457,12 +457,7 @@ int generic_writeback_sb_inodes(struct super_block *sb,
>  
>  		if (inode->i_sb != sb) {
>  			if (only_this_sb) {
> -				/*
> -				 * We only want to write back data for this
> -				 * superblock, move all inodes not belonging
> -				 * to it back onto the dirty list.
> -				 */
> -				redirty_tail(inode);
> +				requeue_io(inode);
>  				continue;
>  			}
>