> One of the many requirements for writeback is that if userspace is
> continually dirtying pages in a particular file, that shouldn't cause
> the kupdate function to concentrate on that file's newly-dirtied pages,
> neglecting pages from other files which were less-recently dirtied.
> (and dirty nodes, etc).
Sadly I do find the old pages that the flusher never get a chance to
catch and write them out.
In the below case, if the task dirties pages fast enough at the end of
file, writeback_index will never get a chance to wrap back. There may
be various variations of this case.
file head
[ *** ==>***************]==>
old pages writeback_index fresh dirties
Ironically the current kernel relies on pageout() to catch these
old pages, which is not only inefficient, but also not reliable.
If a full LRU walk takes an hour, the old pages may stay dirtied
for an hour.
We may have to do (conditional) tagged ->writepages to safeguard users
from losing data he'd expect to be written hours ago.
Thanks,
Fengguang
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