Re: [PATCH 2/2 v2] xfs: log all dirty inodes in xfs_fs_sync_fs

Dave Chinner
2011-12-20T21:21:11Z

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 03:08:41PM -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Since Linux 2.6.36 the writeback code has introduces various measures for
> live lock prevention during sync(). Unfortunately some of these are
> actively harmful for the XFS model, where the inode gets marked dirty for
> metadata from the data I/O handler.
>
> The older_than_this checks that are now more strictly enforced since
>
> writeback: avoid livelocking WB_SYNC_ALL writeback
>
> by only calling into __writeback_inodes_sb and thus only sampling the
> current cut off time once. But on a slow enough devices the previous
> asynchronous sync pass might not have fully completed yet, and thus XFS
> might mark metadata dirty only after that sampling of the cut off time for
> the blocking pass already happened. I have not myself reproduced this
> myself on a real system, but by introducing artificial delay into the
> XFS I/O completion workqueues it can be reproduced easily.
>
> Fix this by iterating over all XFS inodes in ->sync_fs and log all that
> are dirty. This might log inode that only got redirtied after the
> previous pass, but given how cheap delayed logging of inodes is it
> isn't a major concern for performance.
>
> Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>

Looks OK now.

Reviewed-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>

--
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com