Re: [RFC][PATCH 7/7] writeback: balance_dirty_pages() shall write more than dirtied pages

Chris Mason
2009-09-10T12:58:14Z

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 09:42:01AM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 11:44:13PM +0800, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Wed 09-09-09 22:51:48, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > > Some filesystem may choose to write much more than ratelimit_pages
> > > before calling balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr(). So it is safer to
> > > determine number to write based on real number of dirtied pages.
> > >
> > > The increased write_chunk may make the dirtier more bumpy. This is
> > > filesystem writers' duty not to dirty too much at a time without
> > > checking the ratelimit.
> > I don't get this. balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr() is called when we
> > dirty the page, not when we write it out. So a problem would only happen if
> > filesystem dirties pages by set_page_dirty() and won't call
> > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr(). But e.g. generic_perform_write()
> > and do_wp_page() takes care of that. So where's the problem?
>
> It seems that btrfs_file_write() is writing in chunks of up to 1024-pages
> (1024 is the computed nrptrs value in a 32bit kernel). And it calls
> balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr() each time it dirtied such a chunk.

I can easily change this to call more often, but we do always call
balance_dirty_pages to reflect how much ram we've really sent down.

-chris