When writing back an inode and performing an fsync on it concurrently, a deadlock issue may arise as shown below. In each writeback iteration, a clean inode is requeued to the wb->b_dirty queue due to non-zero pages_skipped, without anything actually being written. This causes an infinite loop and prevents the plug from being flushed, resulting in a deadlock. We now avoid requeuing the clean inode to prevent this issue. wb_writeback fsync (inode-Y) blk_start_plug(&plug) for (;;) { iter i-1: some reqs with page-X added into plug->mq_list // f2fs node page-X with PG_writeback filemap_fdatawrite __filemap_fdatawrite_range // write inode-Y with sync_mode WB_SYNC_ALL do_writepages f2fs_write_data_pages __f2fs_write_data_pages // wb_sync_req[DATA]++ for WB_SYNC_ALL f2fs_write_cache_pages f2fs_write_single_data_page f2fs_do_write_data_page f2fs_outplace_write_data f2fs_update_data_blkaddr f2fs_wait_on_page_writeback wait_on_page_writeback // wait for f2fs node page-X iter i: progress = __writeback_inodes_wb(wb, work) . writeback_sb_inodes . __writeback_single_inode // write inode-Y with sync_mode WB_SYNC_NONE . . do_writepages . . f2fs_write_data_pages . . . __f2fs_write_data_pages // skip writepages due to (wb_sync_req[DATA]>0) . . . wbc->pages_skipped += get_dirty_pages(inode) // wbc->pages_skipped = 1 . if (!(inode->i_state & I_DIRTY_ALL)) // i_state = I_SYNC | I_SYNC_QUEUED . total_wrote++; // total_wrote = 1 . requeue_inode // requeue inode-Y to wb->b_dirty queue due to non-zero pages_skipped if (progress) // progress = 1 continue; iter i+1: queue_io // similar process with iter i, infinite for-loop ! } blk_finish_plug(&plug) // flush plug won't be called Signed-off-by: Chunhai Guo <guochunhai@xxxxxxxx> --- fs/fs-writeback.c | 11 ++++++++--- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c index 969ce991b0b0..c1af01b2c42d 100644 --- a/fs/fs-writeback.c +++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c @@ -1535,10 +1535,15 @@ static void requeue_inode(struct inode *inode, struct bdi_writeback *wb, if (wbc->pages_skipped) { /* - * writeback is not making progress due to locked - * buffers. Skip this inode for now. + * Writeback is not making progress due to locked buffers. + * Skip this inode for now. Although having skipped pages + * is odd for clean inodes, it can happen for some + * filesystems so handle that gracefully. */ - redirty_tail_locked(inode, wb); + if (inode->i_state & I_DIRTY_ALL) + redirty_tail_locked(inode, wb); + else + inode_cgwb_move_to_attached(inode, wb); return; } -- 2.25.1