Re: [PATCH 04/23] page-writeback: Convert write_cache_pages() to use filemap_get_folios_tag()

Matthew Wilcox
2022-11-04T15:27:24Z

On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 08:01:52AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 01, 2022 at 03:01:19PM -0700, Vishal Moola (Oracle) wrote:
> > @@ -2313,17 +2313,18 @@ int write_cache_pages(struct address_space *mapping,
> > while (!done && (index <= end)) {
> > int i;
> >
> > - nr_pages = pagevec_lookup_range_tag(&pvec, mapping, &index, end,
> > - tag);
> > - if (nr_pages == 0)
> > + nr_folios = filemap_get_folios_tag(mapping, &index, end,
> > + tag, &fbatch);
>
> This can find and return dirty multi-page folios if the filesystem
> enables them in the mapping at instantiation time, right?

Correct. Just like before the patch. pagevec_lookup_range_tag() has
only ever returned head pages, never tail pages. This is probably
because shmem (which was our only fs that supported compound pages)
never supported writeback, so never looked up pages by tag.

> > trace_wbc_writepage(wbc, inode_to_bdi(mapping->host));
> > - error = (*writepage)(page, wbc, data);
> > + error = writepage(&folio->page, wbc, data);
>
> Yet, IIUC, this treats all folios as if they are single page folios.
> i.e. it passes the head page of a multi-page folio to a callback
> that will treat it as a single PAGE_SIZE page, because that's all
> the writepage callbacks are currently expected to be passed...
>
> So won't this break writeback of dirty multipage folios?

No. A filesystem only sets the flag to create multipage folios once its
writeback callback handles multipage folios correctly (amongst many other
things that have to be fixed and tested). I haven't written down all
the things that a filesystem maintainer needs to check at least partly
because I don't know how representative XFS/iomap are of all filesystems.