Re: 2.6.14-rc2-mm1 - ext3 wedging up

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 04:46:19PM -0500, Dave Kleikamp wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 15:59 -0500, Dave Kleikamp wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 15:57 -0500, Dave Kleikamp wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 17:31 +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > > > Hello,
> > > > 
> > > > Can you try this updated patch? I believe the blk_congestion_wait is
> > > > just wrong there, since there may be just one page being flushed. That
> > > > sounds like a longstanding bug except it normally wouldn't trigger
> > > > because the dirty levels never goes down near zero during heavy writes.
> > > 
> > > fsx is now stuck in a loop somewhere, using 100% cpu.
> > 
> > I hit send a little early.  It eventually responded to a ^C.  I'll try
> > to get some more info.
> 
> I'd guess that it's spinning in balance_dirty_pages.
> /proc/<pid>/future_dirty is 25650 for fsx.  It appears that

Ok the good news is that this isn't a bug in the basic algorithm, but
just in the implementation of it.

> nr_reclaimable is not going to zero for some reason.

Exactly, the !nr_reclaimable check is what I thought would have
prevented an infinite loop to trigger...

Unfortunately I couldn't reproduce on my laptop, I was working from the
laptop the whole last week (I even did a presentation with this patch
applied ;), I'll try to reprouce with fsx now.

Thanks for the help!