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

Christoph Hellwig
2010-02-15T16:24:58Z

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 03:21:27AM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> Also, I wonder what you think about leaving the tags dangling when
> the loop bails out early? I have a *slight* concern about this
> because previously we never have a tag set when radix_tree_delete
> is called. I actually had a bug in that code in earlier versions
> of rcu radix tree that only got found by the user test harness.
> And another slight concern that it is just a bit ugly to leave the
> tag. But I can accept that lower CPU overhead trumps ugliness :)

The XFS inode cache calls radix_tree_delete with a tag set, and
interestingly enough we're trying to catch a very weird bug in that
area currently, which seems more or less directly related to the use
of tags. But we also had a real locking bug related to tags, so I'm
not yet sure what the issue is back until I hear back from the bug
reported and reproducer.