fsync_buffers_list() and sync_dirty_buffer() both issue async writes and
then immediately wait on them. Conceptually, that makes them sync writes
and we should treat them as such so that the IO schedulers can handle
them appropriately.
This patch fixes a write starvation issue that Lin Ming reported, where
xx is stuck for more than 2 minutes because of a large number of
synchronous IO in the system:
Lin Ming confirms that this patch fixes the issue. I've run tests with
it for the past week and no ill effects have been observed, so I'm
proposing it for inclusion into 2.6.26.