Current -mm tree has bucketful of bug fixes in periodic writeback path.
However, we still hit a glitch where dirty pages on a given inode aren't
completely flushed to the disk, and system will accumulate large amount of
dirty pages beyond what dirty_expire_interval is designed for.
The problem is __sync_single_inode() will move an inode to sb->s_dirty list
even when there are more pending dirty pages on that inode. If there is
another inode with a small number of dirty pages, we hit a case where the loop
iteration in wb_kupdate() terminates prematurely because wbc.nr_to_write > 0.
Thus leaving the inode that has large amount of dirty pages behind and it has
to wait for another dirty_writeback_interval before we flush it again. We
effectively only write out MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES every dirty_writeback_interval.
If the rate of dirtying is sufficiently high, the system will start
accumulate a large number of dirty pages.
So fix it by having another sb->s_more_io list on which to park the inode
while we iterate through sb->s_io and to allow each dirty inode which resides
on that sb to have an equal chance of flushing some amount of dirty pages.
Signed-off-by: Ken Chen <kenchen@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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