writeback: don't busy retry writeback on new/freeing inodes
authorWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 06:08:50 +0000 (23:08 -0700)
committerWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Sun, 24 Jul 2011 02:46:51 +0000 (10:46 +0800)
commitfcc5c22218a18509a7412bf074fc9a7a5d874a8a
tree338828e4017ed7c603b93c541c34af4e4005bd31
parent1a12d8bd7b2998be01ee55edb64e7473728abb9c
writeback: don't busy retry writeback on new/freeing inodes

Fix a system hang bug introduced by commit b7a2441f9966 ("writeback:
remove writeback_control.more_io") and e8dfc3058 ("writeback: elevate
queue_io() into wb_writeback()") easily reproducible with high memory
pressure and lots of file creation/deletions, for example, a kernel
build in limited memory.

It hangs when some inode is in the I_NEW, I_FREEING or I_WILL_FREE
state, the flusher will get stuck busy retrying that inode, never
releasing wb->list_lock. The lock in turn blocks all kinds of other
tasks when they are trying to grab it.

As put by Jan, it's a safe change regarding data integrity. I_FREEING or
I_WILL_FREE inodes are written back by iput_final() and it is reclaim
code that is responsible for eventually removing them. So writeback code
can safely ignore them. I_NEW inodes should move out of this state when
they are fully set up and in the writeback round following that, we will
consider them for writeback. So the change makes sense.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reported-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Tested-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
fs/fs-writeback.c