From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Eric Sandeen Subject: Re: Where all does preallocated/extra space hide? Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:56:25 -0500 Message-ID: <4ACE0BA9.4090607@redhat.com> References: <4AC23A17.5020100@redhat.com> <20091008114851.GA22610@skywalker.linux.vnet.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: ext4 development To: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" Return-path: Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:27102 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1758655AbZJHP5C (ORCPT ); Thu, 8 Oct 2009 11:57:02 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20091008114851.GA22610@skywalker.linux.vnet.ibm.com> Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote: > On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 11:47:19AM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote: >> I was running some of the xfstests enospc tests on ext4, and they were >> failing; in one case, manymanymany small files are made to fill up a >> 100M filesystem. ext4 stops quite early with -ENOSPC, but after a bit, >> (or after a "sync") we get 40MB free again. So 40% of the fs space is >> hidden somewhere in preallocation... >> >> I tried calling out to discard group prealloc but that's only a few >> blocks. I'll go trace through the sync paths to see what all gets >> released, but if anyone knows offhand where the rest of that space is >> hiding, please give me a shout. :) >> > > > preallocation space is discarded by default if we fail a block allocation > ext4_mb_discard_preallocations does that. What might be happening is the > extra meta data blocks that we reserve for making sure we will be able > to properly insert the new extent on block allocation. I guess we should > force a data allocation when we fail with ENOSPC in ext4_da_writepages > We currently force a journal commit so that the we claim back the blocks > from deleted files. But we can also force block allocation for delayed > allocated inodes so that we free some of the extra meta data we reserved > > -aneesh Yep, I should have followed up, I narrowed it down to just that - the worst-case metadata blocks - 2 metadata blocks for a 20-byte write into an empty file. :) I'm working on an inode walker to push out delalloc files on enospc. Thanks, -Eric