Re: [PATCH 2/3] Fix fsync livelock

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Sun, 5 Oct 2008 20:01:46 -0400 (EDT)
Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> wrote:

> I assume that if very few people complained about the livelock till
> now, very few people will see degraded write performance. My patch
> blocks the writes only if the livelock happens, so if the livelock
> doesn't happen in unpatched kernel for most people, the patch won't
> make it worse.

I object to calling this a livelock. It's not. 
And yes, fsync is slow and lots of people are seeing that.
It's not helped by how ext3 is implemented (where fsync is effectively
equivalent of a sync for many cases).
But again, moving the latency to "innocent" parties is not acceptable.

> 
> > If the fsync() implementation isn't smart enough, sure, lets improve
> > it. But not by shifting latency around... lets make it more
> > efficient at submitting IO.
> > If we need to invent something like "chained IO" where if you wait
> > on the last of the chain, you wait on the entirely chain, so be it.
> 
> This looks madly complicated. And ineffective, because if some page
> was submitted before fsync() was invoked, and is under writeback
> while fsync() is called, fsync() still has to wait on it.

so?
just make a chain per inode always...


-- 
Arjan van de Ven 	Intel Open Source Technology Centre
For development, discussion and tips for power savings, 
visit http://www.lesswatts.org