writeback: update dirtied_when for synced inode to prevent livelock
Explicitly update .dirtied_when on synced inodes, so that they are no
longer considered for writeback in the next round.
It can prevent both of the following livelock schemes:
- while true; do echo data >> f; done
- while true; do touch f; done (in theory)
The exact livelock condition is, during sync(1):
(1) no new inodes are dirtied
(2) an inode being actively dirtied
On (2), the inode will be tagged and synced with .nr_to_write=LONG_MAX.
When finished, it will be redirty_tail()ed because it's still dirty
and (.nr_to_write > 0). redirty_tail() won't update its ->dirtied_when
on condition (1). The sync work will then revisit it on the next
queue_io() and find it eligible again because its old ->dirtied_when
predates the sync work start time.
We'll do more aggressive "keep writeback as long as we wrote something"
logic in wb_writeback(). The "use LONG_MAX .nr_to_write" trick in commit
b9543dac5bbc ("writeback: avoid livelocking WB_SYNC_ALL writeback") will
no longer be enough to stop sync livelock.
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c
index 5ed2ce9..fe190a8 100644
--- a/fs/fs-writeback.c
+++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c
@@ -419,6 +419,15 @@
spin_lock(&inode->i_lock);
inode->i_state &= ~I_SYNC;
if (!(inode->i_state & I_FREEING)) {
+ /*
+ * Sync livelock prevention. Each inode is tagged and synced in
+ * one shot. If still dirty, it will be redirty_tail()'ed below.
+ * Update the dirty time to prevent enqueue and sync it again.
+ */
+ if ((inode->i_state & I_DIRTY) &&
+ (wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL || wbc->tagged_writepages))
+ inode->dirtied_when = jiffies;
+
if (mapping_tagged(mapping, PAGECACHE_TAG_DIRTY)) {
/*
* We didn't write back all the pages. nfs_writepages()