On 11/6/07, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 15:25 +1100, David Chinner wrote: > > > I'm struggling to understand what possible changed in XFS or writeback that > > would lead to stalls like this, esp. as you appear to be removing files when > > the stalls occur. > > Just a crazy idea,.. > > Could there be a set_page_dirty() that doesn't have > balance_dirty_pages() call near? For example modifying meta data in > unlink? > > Such a situation could lead to an excess of dirty pages and the next > call to balance_dirty_pages() would appear to stall, as it would > desperately try to get below the limit again. Only if accounting of the dirty pages is also broken. In the unmerge testcase I see most of the time only <200kb of dirty data in /proc/meminfo. The system has 4Gb of RAM so I'm not sure if it should ever be valid to stall even the emerge/install testcase. Torsten Now building a kernel with the skipped-pages-accounting-patch reverted... - 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
