On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 09:01:22AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote: > On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 03:19:09AM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > > > Are people still annoyed about writes taking unexpectedly long amounts of tme > > due to the stable page write patchset? I'm guessing yes... > > I haven't heard anyone except th elunatic fringe complain > recently... > > > I'm close to posting a patchset that (a) gates the wait_on_page_writeback calls > > on a flag that you can set in the bdi to indicate that you need stable writes > > (which blk_integrity_register will set); > > I'd prefer stable pages by default (e.g. btrfs needs it for sane > data crc calculations), with an option to turn it off. > > > (b) (ab)uses a page flag bit (PG_slab) > > to indicate that a page is actually being sent out to disk hardware; and (c) > > I don't think you can do that. You can send slab allocated memory to > disk (e.g. kmalloc()d memory) and XFS definitely does that for > sub-page sized metadata. I'm pretty sure that means the PG_slab > flag is not available for (ab)use in the IO path.... I gave up on PG_slab and declared my own PG_ bit. Unfortunately, atm I can't remember which bit of code marks the page ptes so that they have to go back through page_mkwrite, where we can trap the write. Hopefully for a shorter duration. Also, I was wondering -- is it possible to pursue a dual strategy? If we can obtain a memory page without sleeping or causing any writeback, then use the page as a bounce buffer. Otherwise, just wait like we do now. It looks as though one could use __GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NO_MEMALLOC to see if the allocator can give out a page without having to run reclaim...? --D > > Cheers, > > Dave. > -- > Dave Chinner > david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- 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
