After making dirty a 100M file, the normal behavior is to start the writeback
for all data after 30s delays. But sometimes the following happens instead:
- after 30s: ~4M
- after 5s: ~4M
- after 5s: all remaining 92M
Some analyze shows that the internal io dispatch queues goes like this:
s_io s_more_io
-------------------------
1) 100M,1K 0
2) 1K 96M
3) 0 96M
1) initial state with a 100M file and a 1K file
2) 4M written, nr_to_write <= 0, so write more
3) 1K written, nr_to_write > 0, no more writes(BUG)
nr_to_write > 0 in (3) fools the upper layer to think that data have all been
written out. The big dirty file is actually still sitting in s_more_io. We
cannot simply splice s_more_io back to s_io as soon as s_io becomes empty, and
let the loop in generic_sync_sb_inodes() continue: this may starve newly
expired inodes in s_dirty. It is also not an option to draw inodes from both
s_more_io and s_dirty, an let the loop go on: this might lead to live locks,
and might also starve other superblocks in sync time(well kupdate may still
starve some superblocks, that's another bug).
We have to return when a full scan of s_io completes. So nr_to_write > 0 does
not necessarily mean that "all data are written". This patch introduces a
flag writeback_control.more_io to indicate this situation. With it the big
dirty file no longer has to wait for the next kupdate invocation 5s later.
Cc: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: Ken Chen <kenchen@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2e6883bdf4