Jan Kara wrote: ... >> + /* try a sync to flush delalloc space & free resvd metadata */ >> + if (!ext4_has_free_blocks(EXT4_SB(sb), 1) && dirtyblocks) { >> + if (!ext4_journal_current_handle()) { >> + down_read(&sb->s_umount); >> + sync_inodes_sb(sb); >> + up_read(&sb->s_umount); > ext4_should_retry_alloc() is called quite deep from the filesystem. In > particular we can hold i_mutex of some inodes etc. So I'd almost bet > that taking s_umount sem here violates lock ranking in some code paths > (an easy check would be to enable lockdep and stress the filesystem a > bit). > Also calling sync_inodes_sb() with i_mutex held just seems as a bad > thing to do although I don't see where it could deadlock and so it's > probably just a matter of taste... Well, to be honest I agree with you ;) It does still feel like a hack. > If we start writeback from ext4_nonda_switch as you do below, I think > that we should get decent results even without synchronous writeback in > the allocation path (maybe we'd need to tweak a bit the logic in > ext4_nonda_switch to provide more time for writeback thread to catchup). I think starting writeback helps a lot, but it seems that in the end we still need a synchronous attempt when we hit a real enocpc... after I finish dealing with this corruption thing I'll come back and look at this. Maybe we should put the writeback in for now, and worry about the synchronous sync-up later? Thanks for the review, -Eric > Honza -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html