On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 07:41:42PM +0000, Cheung, Norman wrote: > I'd been checking all the XFS patches if any might relate to my situation and came across this > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.xfs.general/40349/ > > From: Christoph Hellwig <hch <at> infradead.org> > Subject: [PATCH, RFC] writeback: avoid redirtying when ->write_inode failed to clear I_DIRTY > Newsgroups: gmane.comp.file-systems.xfs.general > Date: 2011-08-27 06:14:09 GMT (1 year, 26 weeks, 1 day, 13 hours and 17 minutes ago) > Right now ->write_inode has no way to safely return a EAGAIN without explicitly > redirtying the inode, as we would lose the dirty state otherwise. Most > filesystems get this wrong, but XFS makes heavy use of it to avoid blocking > the flusher thread when ->write_inode hits contentended inode locks. A > contended ilock is something XFS can hit very easibly when extending files, as > the data I/O completion handler takes the lock to update the size, and the > ->write_inode call can race with it fairly easily if writing enough data > in one go so that the completion for the first write come in just before > we call ->write_inode. > > Change the handling of this case to use requeue_io for a quick retry instead > of redirty_tail, which keeps moving out the dirtied_when data and thus keeps > delaying the writeout more and more with every failed attempt to get the lock. > > I wonder if this would have caused my application waiting for xfs_ilock. I checked > that this patch is not in my kernel source (SUSE 11 SP2, Rel 3.0.13-0.27) I have no idea whether it will help or not, because SuSE (like Red Hat) ship a heavily patched kernel and so it's rather hard for anyone here to triage and diagnose problems like this. Further, even if we can find a potential cause, we still can't fix it for you. Hence perhaps you are best advised to talk to your SuSE support contact at this point? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
