mm: only enforce stable page writes if the backing device requires it
Create a helper function to check if a backing device requires stable page
writes and, if so, performs the necessary wait. Then, make it so that all
points in the memory manager that handle making pages writable use the
helper function. This should provide stable page write support to most
filesystems, while eliminating unnecessary waiting for devices that don't
require the feature.
Before this patchset, all filesystems would block, regardless of whether
or not it was necessary. ext3 would wait, but still generate occasional
checksum errors. The network filesystems were left to do their own thing,
so they'd wait too.
After this patchset, all the disk filesystems except ext3 and btrfs will
wait only if the hardware requires it. ext3 (if necessary) snapshots
pages instead of blocking, and btrfs provides its own bdi so the mm will
never wait. Network filesystems haven't been touched, so either they
provide their own stable page guarantees or they don't block at all. The
blocking behavior is back to what it was before 3.0 if you don't have a
disk requiring stable page writes.
Here's the result of using dbench to test latency on ext2:
Throughput 55.4496 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=298.650 ms
As you can see, the maximum write latency drops considerably with this
patch enabled. The other filesystems (ext3/ext4/xfs/btrfs) behave
similarly, but see the cover letter for those results.
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com> Acked-by: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com> Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com> Cc: Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org> Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com> Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich@sandia.gov> Cc: Latchesar Ionkov <lucho@ionkov.net> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>