]> git.karo-electronics.de Git - karo-tx-linux.git/commit
writeback: write_cache_pages doesn't terminate at nr_to_write <= 0
authorDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Tue, 24 Aug 2010 01:44:34 +0000 (11:44 +1000)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:36:08 +0000 (13:36 -0700)
commit6d09dba30dfb88cd8bd3c73d09e4c4209bfd1847
tree93f35e742423c749283d043bb14407648a9e9143
parent480a3d4a3bd4f645c8d5139fc65922be14ba09fa
writeback: write_cache_pages doesn't terminate at nr_to_write <= 0

commit 546a1924224078c6f582e68f890b05b387b42653 upstream.

I noticed XFS writeback in 2.6.36-rc1 was much slower than it should have
been. Enabling writeback tracing showed:

    flush-253:16-8516  [007] 1342952.351608: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=1024 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [007] 1342952.351654: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=1023 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [000] 1342952.369520: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=0 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [000] 1342952.369542: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=-1 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0
    flush-253:16-8516  [000] 1342952.369549: wbc_writepage: bdi 253:16: towrt=-2 skip=0 mode=0 kupd=0 bgrd=1 reclm=0 cyclic=1 more=0 older=0x0 start=0x0 end=0x0

Writeback is not terminating in background writeback if ->writepage is
returning with wbc->nr_to_write == 0, resulting in sub-optimal single page
writeback on XFS.

Fix the write_cache_pages loop to terminate correctly when this situation
occurs and so prevent this sub-optimal background writeback pattern. This
improves sustained sequential buffered write performance from around
250MB/s to 750MB/s for a 100GB file on an XFS filesystem on my 8p test VM.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
mm/page-writeback.c