Excerpts from Christoph Hellwig's message of 2011-04-21 04:32:58 -0400: > On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 02:23:29PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote: > But given that you are able to reproduce it, does the following patch > help your latencies? Currently XFS actually does stop I/O when > nr_to_write reaches zero, but only for non-blocking I/O. This behaviour > was introduced in commit efceab1d563153a2b1a6e7d35376241a48126989 > > "xfs: handle negative wbc->nr_to_write during sync writeback" > > and works around issues in the generic writeback code. > > > Index: linux-2.6/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c > =================================================================== > --- linux-2.6.orig/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c 2011-04-21 10:20:48.303550404 +0200 > +++ linux-2.6/fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_aops.c 2011-04-21 10:20:58.203496773 +0200 > @@ -765,8 +765,7 @@ xfs_convert_page( > SetPageUptodate(page); > > if (count) { > - if (--wbc->nr_to_write <= 0 && > - wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_NONE) > + if (--wbc->nr_to_write <= 0) > done = 1; > } > xfs_start_page_writeback(page, !page_dirty, count); Sorry, this doesn't do it. I think that given what a strange special case this is, we're best off waiting for the IO-less throttling, and maybe changing the code in xfs/ext4 to be a little more seek aware. Or maybe not, it has to get written eventually either way. -chris -- 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