ext4: remove unnecessary superblock dirtying
This patch changes the 'ext4_handle_dirty_super()' function which
submits the superblock for I/O in the following cases:
1. When creating the first large file on a file system without
EXT4_FEATURE_RO_COMPAT_LARGE_FILE feature.
2. When re-sizing the file-system.
3. When creating an xattr on a file-system without the
EXT4_FEATURE_COMPAT_EXT_ATTR feature.
If the file-system has journal enabled, the superblock is written via
the journal. We do not modify this path.
If the file-system has no journal, this function, falls back to just
marking the superblock as dirty using the 's_dirt' superblock
flag. This means that it delays the actual superblock I/O submission
by 5 seconds (default setting). Namely, the 'sync_supers()' kernel
thread will call 'ext4_write_super()' later and will actually submit
the superblock for I/O.
And this is the behavior this patch modifies: we stop using 's_dirt'
and just mark the superblock buffer as dirty right away. Indeed, all 3
cases above are extremely rare and it does not add any value to delay
the I/O submission for them.
Note: 'ext4_handle_dirty_super()' executes
'__ext4_handle_dirty_super()' with 'now = 0'. This patch basically
makes the 'now' argument unneeded and it will be deleted in one of the
next patches.
This patch also removes 's_dirt' condition on the unmount path because
we never set it anymore, so we should not test it.
Tested using xfstests for both journalled and non-journalled ext4.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
2 files changed