Re: [PATCH 0/2] Improve writeout pattern from xfs_flush_pages()

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 02:37:22PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> > from Dave - before that it was asynchronous and in weird context, so
> > it seems we defintively need it to be synchronous.
>   From the changelog it seems it needs to be synchronous in the sense that
> we don't offload flushing to a different thread as we used to. Also the
> reason why previously flushing didn't work was that we held page locks and
> IO lock but it's not the case in xfs_file_buffered_aio_write() anymore. So
> filemap_flush() still looks like an appropriate thing to me.
> 
> > I agree that just flushing this inode seems like a rather odd handling
> > for ENOSPC.  It's even more odd as we already use the big hammer before
> > in when we git ENOSPC in ->write_begin.  The only thing I can imagine is
> > that this is the last attempt to get anything freed.
>   OK, I'll leave it there then. I just wonder whether I should convert it
> to filemap_flush() or to filemap_write_and_wait()...

My preference would be to not touch it unless we have a good reason.