Re: [patch 1/3] fix illogical behavior in balance_dirty_pages()

Andrew Morton
2007-03-26T10:08:37Z

On Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:32:47 +0200 Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu> wrote:

> Stopping writers which have idle queues is completely unproductive,
> and that is basically what the current algorithm does.

This is because the kernel permits all of its allotment of dirty+writeback
pages to be dirty+writeback against a single device.

A good way of solving the one-device-starves-another-one problem is to
dynamically adjust the per-device dirty+writeback levels so that (for
example) if two devices are being written to, each gets 50% of the
allotment.

I started working on that but got derailed by the usual blah. I don't
think either of the proposed fixes took that approach, actually.