Re: regression: 100% io-wait with 2.6.24-rcX

Fengguang Wu
2008-01-15T00:56:08Z

On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 12:41:26PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 12:30 +0100, Joerg Platte wrote:
> > Am Montag, 14. Januar 2008 schrieb Fengguang Wu:
> >
> > > Joerg, this patch fixed the bug for me :-)
> >
> > Fengguang, congratulations, I can confirm that your patch fixed the bug! With
> > previous kernels the bug showed up after each reboot. Now, when booting the
> > patched kernel everything is fine and there is no longer any suspicious
> > iowait!
> >
> > Do you have an idea why this problem appeared in 2.6.24? Did somebody change
> > the ext2 code or is it related to the changes in the scheduler?
>
> It was Fengguang who changed the inode writeback code, and I guess the
> new and improved code was less able do deal with these funny corner
> cases. But he has been very good in tracking them down and solving them,
> kudos to him for that work!

Thank you.

In particular the bug is triggered by the patch named:
"writeback: introduce writeback_control.more_io to indicate more io"
That patch means to speed up writeback, but unfortunately its
aggressiveness has disclosed bugs in reiserfs, jfs and now ext2.

Linus, given the number of bugs it triggered, I'd recommend revert
this patch(git commit 2e6883bdf49abd0e7f0d9b6297fc3be7ebb2250b). Let's
push it back to -mm tree for more testings?

Regards,
Fengguang