writeback: try more writeback as long as something was written
writeback_inodes_wb()/__writeback_inodes_sb() are not aggressive in that they only populate possibly a subset of eligible inodes into b_io at entrance time. When the queued set of inodes are all synced, they just return, possibly with all queued inode pages written but still wbc.nr_to_write > 0. For kupdate and background writeback, there may be more eligible inodes sitting in b_dirty when the current set of b_io inodes are completed. So it is necessary to try another round of writeback as long as we made some progress in this round. When there are no more eligible inodes, no more inodes will be enqueued in queue_io(), hence nothing could/will be synced and we may safely bail. For example, imagine 100 inodes i0, i1, i2, ..., i90, i91, i99 At queue_io() time, i90-i99 happen to be expired and moved to s_io for IO. When finished successfully, if their total size is less than MAX_WRITEBACK_PAGES, nr_to_write will be > 0. Then wb_writeback() will quit the background work (w/o this patch) while it's still over background threshold. This will be a fairly normal/frequent case I guess. Now that we do tagged sync and update inode->dirtied_when after the sync, this change won't livelock sync(1). I actually tried to write 1 page per 1ms with this command write-and-fsync -n10000 -S 1000 -c 4096 /fs/test and do sync(1) at the same time. The sync completes quickly on ext4, xfs, btrfs. Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
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