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Commit 94c3dcbb authored by Wu Fengguang's avatar Wu Fengguang
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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
b9543dac ("writeback: avoid livelocking WB_SYNC_ALL writeback") will
no longer be enough to stop sync livelock.

Reviewed-by: default avatarJan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: default avatarWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
parent 6e6938b6
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+9 −0
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -419,6 +419,15 @@ writeback_single_inode(struct inode *inode, struct writeback_control *wbc)
	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()