tree be2afc18f79aa4ff9be245b0a036aa06185b5dc4
parent ebf8aa44beed48cd17893a83d92a4403e5f9d9e2
author Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> 1281399552 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1281411899 -0700

mm: implement writeback livelock avoidance using page tagging

We try to avoid livelocks of writeback when some steadily creates dirty
pages in a mapping we are writing out.  For memory-cleaning writeback,
using nr_to_write works reasonably well but we cannot really use it for
data integrity writeback.  This patch tries to solve the problem.

The idea is simple: Tag all pages that should be written back with a
special tag (TOWRITE) in the radix tree.  This can be done rather quickly
and thus livelocks should not happen in practice.  Then we start doing the
hard work of locking pages and sending them to disk only for those pages
that have TOWRITE tag set.

Note: Adding new radix tree tag grows radix tree node from 288 to 296
bytes for 32-bit archs and from 552 to 560 bytes for 64-bit archs.
However, the number of slab/slub items per page remains the same (13 and 7
respectively).

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>