On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 01:09:33PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote: > writeback_inodes_wb()/__writeback_inodes_sb() are not agressive in that > they only populate b_io when necessary at entrance time. When the queued > set of inodes are all synced, they just return, possibly with > wbc.nr_to_write > 0. > > For kupdate and background writeback, there may be more eligible inodes > sitting in b_dirty when the current set of b_io inodes are completed. So > it is necessary to try another round of writeback as long as we made some > progress in this round. When there are no more eligible inodes, no more > inodes will be enqueued in queue_io(), hence nothing could/will be > synced and we may safely bail. > > This will livelock sync when there are heavy dirtiers. However in that case > sync will already be livelocked w/o this patch, as the current livelock > avoidance code is virtually a no-op (for one thing, wb_time should be > set statically at sync start time and be used in move_expired_inodes()). > The sync livelock problem will be addressed in other patches. > There does seem to be a livelock issue. During iozone, I see messages in the console log with this series applied that look like [ 1687.132034] INFO: task iozone:21225 blocked for more than 120 seconds. [ 1687.211425] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. [ 1687.305204] iozone D ffff880001b13640 0 21225 21108 0x00000000 [ 1687.387677] ffff880037419d48 0000000000000082 0000000000000348 0000000000013640 [ 1687.476594] ffff880037419fd8 ffff880037419fd8 ffff880065892da0 0000000000013640 [ 1687.565512] 0000000000013640 0000000000013640 ffff880065892da0 ffff88007f411510 [ 1687.654431] Call Trace: [ 1687.683663] [<ffffffff81002996>] ? ftrace_call+0x5/0x2b [ 1687.747204] [<ffffffff812d8f67>] schedule_timeout+0x2d/0x214 [ 1687.815947] [<ffffffff81002996>] ? ftrace_call+0x5/0x2b [ 1687.879489] [<ffffffff812d8527>] wait_for_common+0xd2/0x14a [ 1687.947195] [<ffffffff8103ef1e>] ? default_wake_function+0x0/0x14 [ 1688.021132] [<ffffffff81002996>] ? ftrace_call+0x5/0x2b [ 1688.084680] [<ffffffff811160f0>] ? sync_one_sb+0x0/0x22 [ 1688.148223] [<ffffffff812d8657>] wait_for_completion+0x1d/0x1f [ 1688.219051] [<ffffffff811121c4>] sync_inodes_sb+0x92/0x14c [ 1688.285710] [<ffffffff811160f0>] ? sync_one_sb+0x0/0x22 [ 1688.349249] [<ffffffff811160b9>] __sync_filesystem+0x4c/0x83 [ 1688.417995] [<ffffffff81116110>] sync_one_sb+0x20/0x22 [ 1688.480505] [<ffffffff810f6a23>] iterate_supers+0x66/0xa4 [ 1688.546124] [<ffffffff81116157>] sys_sync+0x45/0x5c [ 1688.605509] [<ffffffff81002c72>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b Similar messages do not appear without the patch. iozone does complete though and the performance figures are not affected. Should I be worried? -- Mel Gorman Part-time Phd Student Linux Technology Center University of Limerick IBM Dublin Software Lab -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>