Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm: Implement writeback livelock avoidance using page tagging

Jan Kara
2010-02-15T15:47:44Z

On Fri 12-02-10 11:39:55, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:06:23 +0100
> Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> wrote:
>
> > The idea is simple: Tag all pages that should be written back
> > with a special tag (TOWRITE) in the radix tree. This can be done
> > rather quickly and thus livelocks should not happen in practice.
> > Then we start doing the hard work of locking pages and sending
> > them to disk only for those pages that have TOWRITE tag set.
>
> Adding a second pass across all the pages sounds expensive?
Strictly speaking it's just through the radix tree and only through
branches with DIRTY_TAG set. But yes, there is some additional CPU cost.
I just thought that given the total cost of submitting a page it is
an acceptable increase and the simplification is worth it.
Would some numbers make you happier? Any suggestion for measurements?
Because I think that even for writes to tmpfs the change will be lost
in the noise...

Honza
--
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SUSE Labs, CR