[PATCH] XFS: Don't flush stale inodes

Dave Chinner
2010-01-02T02:42:25Z

Because inodes remain in cache much longer than inode buffers do
under memory pressure, we can get the situation where we have stale,
dirty inodes being reclaimed but the backing storage has been freed.
Hence we should never, ever flush XFS_ISTALE inodes to disk as
there is no guarantee that the backing buffer is in cache and
still marked stale when the flush occurs.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
---
fs/xfs/xfs_inode.c | 10 +++++++---
1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode.c
index c2618db..e5c9953 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode.c
@@ -2846,10 +2846,14 @@ xfs_iflush(
mp = ip->i_mount;

/*
- * If the inode isn't dirty, then just release the inode
- * flush lock and do nothing.
+ * If the inode isn't dirty, then just release the inode flush lock and
+ * do nothing. Treat stale inodes the same; we cannot rely on the
+ * backing buffer remaining stale in cache for the remaining life of
+ * the stale inode and so xfs_itobp() below may give us a buffer that
+ * no longer contains inodes below. Doing this stale check here also
+ * avoids forcing the log on pinned, stale inodes.
*/
- if (xfs_inode_clean(ip)) {
+ if (xfs_inode_clean(ip) || xfs_iflags_test(ip, XFS_ISTALE)) {
xfs_ifunlock(ip);
return 0;
}
--
1.6.5