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authorFengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>2007-10-16 23:30:42 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-10-17 08:43:02 -0700
commit1f7decf6d9f06dac008b8d66935c0c3b18e564f9 (patch)
treee0f8430bd4e3ed5425aa55b7fa28483341bbfe87 /fs/xfs/linux-2.6
parent08d8e9749e7f0435ba4683b620e8d30d59276b4c (diff)
writeback: remove pages_skipped accounting in __block_write_full_page()
Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu> and me identified a writeback bug: > The following strange behavior can be observed: > > 1. large file is written > 2. after 30 seconds, nr_dirty goes down by 1024 > 3. then for some time (< 30 sec) nothing happens (disk idle) > 4. then nr_dirty again goes down by 1024 > 5. repeat from 3. until whole file is written > > So basically a 4Mbyte chunk of the file is written every 30 seconds. > I'm quite sure this is not the intended behavior. It can be produced by the following test scheme: # cat bin/test-writeback.sh grep nr_dirty /proc/vmstat echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/inode_debug dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/x bs=1K count=204800& while true; do grep nr_dirty /proc/vmstat; sleep 1; done # bin/test-writeback.sh nr_dirty 19207 nr_dirty 19207 nr_dirty 30924 204800+0 records in 204800+0 records out 209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 1.58363 seconds, 132 MB/s nr_dirty 47150 nr_dirty 47141 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47205 nr_dirty 47214 nr_dirty 47214 nr_dirty 47214 nr_dirty 47214 nr_dirty 47214 nr_dirty 47215 nr_dirty 47216 nr_dirty 47216 nr_dirty 47216 nr_dirty 47154 nr_dirty 47143 nr_dirty 47143 nr_dirty 47143 nr_dirty 47143 nr_dirty 47143 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47142 nr_dirty 47134 nr_dirty 47134 nr_dirty 47135 nr_dirty 47135 nr_dirty 47135 nr_dirty 46097 <== -1038 nr_dirty 46098 nr_dirty 46098 nr_dirty 46098 [...] nr_dirty 46091 nr_dirty 46092 nr_dirty 46092 nr_dirty 45069 <== -1023 nr_dirty 45056 nr_dirty 45056 nr_dirty 45056 [...] nr_dirty 37822 nr_dirty 36799 <== -1023 [...] nr_dirty 36781 nr_dirty 35758 <== -1023 [...] nr_dirty 34708 nr_dirty 33672 <== -1024 [...] nr_dirty 33692 nr_dirty 32669 <== -1023 % ls -li /var/x 847824 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 200M 2007-08-12 04:12 /var/x % dmesg|grep 847824 # generated by a debug printk [ 529.263184] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 564.250872] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 594.272797] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 629.231330] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 659.224674] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 689.219890] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 724.226655] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 759.198568] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 # line 548 in fs/fs-writeback.c: 543 if (wbc->pages_skipped != pages_skipped) { 544 /* 545 * writeback is not making progress due to locked 546 * buffers. Skip this inode for now. 547 */ 548 redirty_tail(inode); 549 } More debug efforts show that __block_write_full_page() never has the chance to call submit_bh() for that big dirty file: the buffer head is *clean*. So basicly no page io is issued by __block_write_full_page(), hence pages_skipped goes up. Also the comment in generic_sync_sb_inodes(): 544 /* 545 * writeback is not making progress due to locked 546 * buffers. Skip this inode for now. 547 */ and the comment in __block_write_full_page(): 1713 /* 1714 * The page was marked dirty, but the buffers were 1715 * clean. Someone wrote them back by hand with 1716 * ll_rw_block/submit_bh. A rare case. 1717 */ do not quite agree with each other. The page writeback should be skipped for 'locked buffer', but here it is 'clean buffer'! This patch fixes this bug. Though I'm not sure why __block_write_full_page() is called only to do nothing and who actually issued the writeback for us. This is the two possible new behaviors after the patch: 1) pretty nice: wait 30s and write ALL:) 2) not so good: - during the dd: ~16M - after 30s: ~4M - after 5s: ~4M - after 5s: ~176M The next patch will fix case (2). 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: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'fs/xfs/linux-2.6')
-rw-r--r--fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c5
1 files changed, 2 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c b/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c
index 354d68a32d4a..52bd08c0a278 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c
@@ -402,10 +402,9 @@ xfs_start_page_writeback(
clear_page_dirty_for_io(page);
set_page_writeback(page);
unlock_page(page);
- if (!buffers) {
+ /* If no buffers on the page are to be written, finish it here */
+ if (!buffers)
end_page_writeback(page);
- wbc->pages_skipped++; /* We didn't write this page */
- }
}
static inline int bio_add_buffer(struct bio *bio, struct buffer_head *bh)