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  • Wu Fengguang's avatar
    writeback: try more writeback as long as something was written · e6fb6da2
    Wu Fengguang authored
    
    
    writeback_inodes_wb()/__writeback_inodes_sb() are not aggressive in that
    they only populate possibly a subset of eligible inodes into b_io at
    entrance time. When the queued set of inodes are all synced, they just
    return, possibly with all queued inode pages written but still
    wbc.nr_to_write > 0.
    
    For kupdate and background writeback, there may be more eligible inodes
    sitting in b_dirty when the current set of b_io inodes are completed. So
    it is necessary to try another round of writeback as long as we made some
    progress in this round. When there are no more eligible inodes, no more
    inodes will be enqueued in queue_io(), hence nothing could/will be
    synced and we may safely bail.
    
    For example, imagine 100 inodes
    
            i0, i1, i2, ..., i90, i91, i99
    
    At queue_io() time, i90-i99 happen to be expired and moved to s_io for
    IO. When finished successfully, if their total size is less than
    MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES, nr_to_write will be > 0. Then wb_writeback() will
    quit the background work (w/o this patch) while it's still over
    background threshold. This will be a fairly normal/frequent case I guess.
    
    Now that we do tagged sync and update inode->dirtied_when after the sync,
    this change won't livelock sync(1).  I actually tried to write 1 page
    per 1ms with this command
    
    	write-and-fsync -n10000 -S 1000 -c 4096 /fs/test
    
    and do sync(1) at the same time. The sync completes quickly on ext4,
    xfs, btrfs.
    
    Acked-by: default avatarJan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
    e6fb6da2