writeback: simplify bdi code a little
This patch simplifies bdi code a little by removing the 'pending_list' which is
redundant. Indeed, currently the forker thread ('bdi_forker_thread()') is
working like this:
1. In a loop, fetch all bdi's which have works but have no writeback thread and
move them to the 'pending_list'.
2. If the list is empty, sleep for 5 sec.
3. Otherwise, take one bdi from the list, fork the writeback thread for this
bdi, and repeat the loop.
IOW, it first moves everything to the 'pending_list', then process only one
element, and so on. This patch simplifies the algorithm, which is now as
follows.
1. Find the first bdi which has a work and remove it from the global list of
bdi's (bdi_list).
2. If there was not such bdi, sleep 5 sec.
3. Fork the writeback thread for this bdi and repeat the loop.
IOW, now we find the first bdi to process, process it, and so on. This is
simpler and involves less lists.
The bonus now is that we can get rid of a couple of functions, as well as
remove complications which involve 'rcu_call()' and 'bdi->rcu_head'.
This patch also makes sure we use 'list_add_tail_rcu()', instead of plain
'list_add_tail()', but this piece of code is going to be removed in the next
patch anyway.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2 files changed