On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 10:49:55AM -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > If the writeback code writes back an inode because it has expired we currently > use the non-blockin ->write_inode path. This means any inode that is pinned > is skipped. With delayed logging and a workload that has very little log > traffic otherwise it is very likely that an inode that gets constantly > written to is always pinned, and thus we keep refusing to write it. The VM > writeback code at that point redirties it and doesn't try to write it again > for another 30 seconds. This means under certain scenarious time based > metadata writeback never happens. > > Fix this by calling into xfs_log_inode for kupdate in addition to data > integrity syncs, and thus transfer the inode to the log ASAP. > > Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> > > Index: xfs/fs/xfs/xfs_super.c > =================================================================== > --- xfs.orig/fs/xfs/xfs_super.c 2011-12-14 05:33:07.193262189 -0800 > +++ xfs/fs/xfs/xfs_super.c 2011-12-14 05:38:56.108038623 -0800 > @@ -905,7 +884,7 @@ xfs_fs_write_inode( I could not reproduce a situation where this was called with for_kupdate set and the inode was pinned for very long. I'm curious if there was an easy workload to reproduce this. > if (!ip->i_update_core) > return 0; > > - if (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL) { > + if (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL || wbc->for_kupdate) { It looks to me that this is the relevant codepath: bdi_writeback_thread .or. bdi_forker_thread wb_do_writeback wb_check_old_data_flush wb_writeback writeback_sb_inodes writeback_single_inode write_inode .write_inode xfs_fs_write_inode AFAICS the only place that for_kupdate is set is in wb_check_old_data_flush. Reviewed-by: Mark Tinguely <tinguely@xxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Ben Myers <bpm@xxxxxxx> _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs