tree 255244e6bb9340d4b8ce1fa6b4d2ed4adece4b15
parent aa373cf550994623efb5d49a4d8775bafd10bbc1
author Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> 1294962348 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1294968752 -0800

writeback: avoid livelocking WB_SYNC_ALL writeback

When wb_writeback() is called in WB_SYNC_ALL mode, work->nr_to_write is
usually set to LONG_MAX.  The logic in wb_writeback() then calls
__writeback_inodes_sb() with nr_to_write == MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES and we
easily end up with non-positive nr_to_write after the function returns, if
the inode has more than MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES dirty pages at the moment.

When nr_to_write is <= 0 wb_writeback() decides we need another round of
writeback but this is wrong in some cases!  For example when a single
large file is continuously dirtied, we would never finish syncing it
because each pass would be able to write MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES and inode
dirty timestamp never gets updated (as inode is never completely clean).
Thus __writeback_inodes_sb() would write the redirtied inode again and
again.

Fix the issue by setting nr_to_write to LONG_MAX in WB_SYNC_ALL mode.  We
do not need nr_to_write in WB_SYNC_ALL mode anyway since
write_cache_pages() does livelock avoidance using page tagging in
WB_SYNC_ALL mode.

This makes wb_writeback() call __writeback_inodes_sb() only once on
WB_SYNC_ALL.  The latter function won't livelock because it works on

- a finite set of files by doing queue_io() once at the beginning
- a finite set of pages by PAGECACHE_TAG_TOWRITE page tagging

After this patch, program from http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/10/24/154 is no
longer able to stall sync forever.

[fengguang.wu@intel.com: fix locking comment]
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>