Andrew, I wrote a simple script to test sync livelock and this patchset is working as expected: sync time: 2 Dirty: 26492 kB Writeback: 30260 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB sync NOT livelocked In particular patch 2 fixes the sync livelock problem introduced by patch "writeback: try more writeback as long as something was written". Thanks, Fengguang --- #!/bin/sh umount /dev/sda7 # mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sda7 mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda7 mount /dev/sda7 /fs echo $((50<<20)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes pid= for i in `seq 10` do dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero-$i bs=1M count=1000 & pid="$pid $!" done sleep 1 tic=$(date +'%s') sync tac=$(date +'%s') echo echo sync time: $((tac-tic)) egrep '(Dirty|Writeback|NFS_Unstable)' /proc/meminfo pidof dd > /dev/null && { kill -9 $pid; echo sync NOT livelocked; } -- 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