Re: [PATCH 2/7] Assign bdi in super_block

Jens Axboe
2009-09-14T18:36:54Z

On Mon, Sep 14 2009, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-09-14 at 15:02 +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> > On Mon 14-09-09 11:36:29, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > > We do this automatically in get_sb_bdev() from the set_bdev_super()
> > > callback. Filesystems that have their own private backing_dev_info
> > > must assign that in ->fill_super().
> > >
> > > Note that ->s_bdi assignment is required for proper writeback!
> > >
> > > Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
> > > Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
> > Hmm, looking at this again, I'm not sure this will work for NFS. It seems
> > to set mapping->backing_dev_info to its private backing dev info for
> > regular files while it leaves it intact for other inodes (e.g.
> > directories). I'm not sure why it does so but it seems its inodes end up on
> > two different BDI lists and thus they wouldn't be synced properly. Trond,
> > do I read the code properly?
> > Also we definitely need to set *some* bdi in nfs_get_sb as otherwise sync
> > won't work for it.
>
> There hasn't really been a need for a bdi in NFS other than for the
> regular file read and writeback code. The main reason for making it
> private was to ensure that we could set a per-superblock readahead limit
> that was a decent multiple of the server's preferred read block size.
>
> Is there any reason why we couldn't set sb->s_bdi to point to that
> private bdi?

No, that should work fine. NFS already works fine with the bdi flusher
threads, so you should just point it at that bdi.

If you could take a look at the parent patch and give some input (or an
addition for NFS, even better), then I would much appreciate it.

--
Jens Axboe