On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 09:22:16PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote: > > > Fengguang, how about merging also the attached simple patch together with > > > my fix? With these two patches, I'm not able to trigger any sync livelock > > > while without one of them I hit them quite easily... > > > > This looks OK. However note that redirty_tail() can modify > > dirtied_when unexpectedly. So the more we rely on wb_start, the more > > possibility an inode is (wrongly) skipped by sync. I have a bunch of > > patches to remove redirty_tail(). However they may not be good > > candidates for 2.6.36.. > > It looks that setting wb_start at the beginning of > writeback_inodes_wb() won't be easily affected by redirty_tail(). Except for this redirty_tail(), which may mess up the dirtied_when ordering in b_dirty and later on break the assumption of inode_dirtied_after(inode, wbc->wb_start). It can be replaced by a requeue_io() for now. Christoph mentioned a patchset to introduce sb->s_wb, which should be a better solution. Thanks, Fengguang diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c index a178828..e56e68b 100644 --- a/fs/fs-writeback.c +++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c @@ -457,12 +457,7 @@ int generic_writeback_sb_inodes(struct super_block *sb, if (inode->i_sb != sb) { if (only_this_sb) { - /* - * We only want to write back data for this - * superblock, move all inodes not belonging - * to it back onto the dirty list. - */ - redirty_tail(inode); + requeue_io(inode); continue; } -- 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>