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From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
To: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>, xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] xfs: dummy transactions should not dirty VFS state
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 09:50:49 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100803135049.GA32679@infradead.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20100803120728.GA26402@dastard>

On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 10:07:28PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> Yes, I noticed those things. Especially as I modified the wrong
> one in the first place and realised both need fixing and the
> duplication of code seems completely unnecessary. We should have
> only one copy of this code, not two copies that do slightly
> different things.

Yes, having one copy is much better.

> > For one
> > xfs_commit_dummy_trans doesn't actually commit a synchronous transaction
> > (or rather forces out the log) unless SYNC_WAIT is set,
> 
> I don't think that we really _need_ a non-blocking version - waiting
> for a single sync transaction in xfssyncd once every 36s is hardly
> going to kill performance.

Sounds fair, but it needs documentation in the changelog, and possibly
in the source code as well.

> > in addition
> > to that xfs_fs_log_dummy uses _xfs_trans_alloc, which doesn't get
> > blocked by the filesystem freezing.
> 
> Everything will be clean on a frozen filesystem, so all the current
> code does is block the xfssyncd until the filesytem is
> unfrozen. Given that we can still read everything on the frozen
> filesystem, inode caches can still grow and hence we still need to
> run regular reclaiming. If the xfssyncd is blocked then only memory
> pressure can free up inodes.

That's a reason not to wait.  But given the bugs we had in this area
I'd rather not blindly start the transaction here.

Instead we could check s_frozen manually to no bother even doing
the calls to write the dummy record, plus maybe an assert so that it
trips up for debug builds.

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      reply	other threads:[~2010-08-03 13:50 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-08-03  9:10 [PATCH] xfs: dummy transactions should not dirty VFS state Dave Chinner
2010-08-03  9:55 ` Christoph Hellwig
2010-08-03 12:07   ` Dave Chinner
2010-08-03 13:50     ` Christoph Hellwig [this message]

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