Re: [GIT PULL] block/io bits for 2.6.35-rc

[Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>]

On 2010-06-10 17:55, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com> wrote:
>>
>> - A set of patches fixing the WB_SYNC_NONE writeback from Christoph. So
>>  we should finally have both functional and working WB_SYNC_NONE from
>>  umount context.
> 
> I _really_ think this is too late, considering how broken it has been.
> We already reverted the WB_SYNC_NONE things exactly because it didn't
> work, didn't we? I'm going to be off-line in two days, and this part
> of the pull request really makes me nervous, if only simply because of
> the history of it all (ie it's always been broken, why shouldn't it be
> broken now?).
> 
> IOW, that's a lot of scary changes, that have historically not been
> safe or sufficiently tested, and have caused problems for various
> filesystems. Convince me why they should suddenly be ok to merge?

I agree, it's late and it makes me nervous too. I had them cook for
a day, didn't see any problems. And Christoph would not send it in
unless it passes at least xfs qa, which is what found the problems
last time (the ones we reverted).

It's fixing a regression where umount takes a LONG time if you have
a lot of dirty inodes, since it basically degenerates to a data
integrity writeback instead of a simple WB_SYNC_NONE. If it wasn't
fixing a nasty regression (the distros are all wanting a real fix
for this, it's a user problem), I would not be submitting this code
at this point in time.

-- 
Jens Axboe