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  • Dave Chinner's avatar
    writeback: limit write_cache_pages integrity scanning to current EOF · d87815cb
    Dave Chinner authored
    
    
    sync can currently take a really long time if a concurrent writer is
    extending a file. The problem is that the dirty pages on the address
    space grow in the same direction as write_cache_pages scans, so if
    the writer keeps ahead of writeback, the writeback will not
    terminate until the writer stops adding dirty pages.
    
    For a data integrity sync, we only need to write the pages dirty at
    the time we start the writeback, so we can stop scanning once we get
    to the page that was at the end of the file at the time the scan
    started.
    
    This will prevent operations like copying a large file preventing
    sync from completing as it will not write back pages that were
    dirtied after the sync was started. This does not impact the
    existing integrity guarantees, as any dirty page (old or new)
    within the EOF range at the start of the scan will still be
    captured.
    
    This patch will not prevent sync from blocking on large writes into
    holes. That requires more complex intervention while this patch only
    addresses the common append-case of this sync holdoff.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarChristoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    d87815cb