Re: [PATCH 3/4] writeback: pay attention to wbc->nr_to_write in write_cache_pages

Andrew Morton
2010-04-29T21:38:18Z

On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:41:53 +1000
Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:

> If a filesystem writes more than one page in ->writepage, write_cache_pages
> fails to notice this and continues to attempt writeback when wbc->nr_to_write
> has gone negative - this trace was captured from XFS:
>
>
> wbc_writeback_start: towrt=1024
> wbc_writepage: towrt=1024
> wbc_writepage: towrt=0
> wbc_writepage: towrt=-1
> wbc_writepage: towrt=-5
> wbc_writepage: towrt=-21
> wbc_writepage: towrt=-85
>

Bug.

AFAIT it's a regression introduced by

: commit 17bc6c30cf6bfffd816bdc53682dd46fc34a2cf4
: Author: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
: AuthorDate: Thu Oct 16 10:09:17 2008 -0400
: Commit: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
: CommitDate: Thu Oct 16 10:09:17 2008 -0400
:
: vfs: Add no_nrwrite_index_update writeback control flag

I suggest that what you do here is remove the local `nr_to_write' from
write_cache_pages() and go back to directly using wbc->nr_to_write
within the loop.

And thus we restore the convention that if the fs writes back more than
a single page, it subtracts (nr_written - 1) from wbc->nr_to_write.