Re: [PATCH] balance_dirty_pages - exit loop when no more pages available

From: Chuck Ebbert
Date: Thu Aug 02 2007 - 15:54:30 EST


On 07/31/2007 01:11 PM, richard kennedy wrote:

Peter, did you see this?

> exit loop in balance_dirty_pages when no more pages available to write
>
> On a bdi that has very little traffic balance_dirty_pages can loop
> needlessly waiting until do_writepages has written enough pages.
>
> do_writepages will return encountered_congestion==0 && nr_to_write > 0
> when it has completed a pass but did not find enough pages available to
> write. balance_dirty_pages ignores this and keeps looping until a total
> of chunk pages was written.
>
> this patch adds an extra exit condition to break out of the loop in this
> case.
>
> I've tested this on my amd64 desktop, and I also have a version of this
> patch that includes a printk and a test case that occasionally does
> trigger this condition.
>
> Signed-off-by: Richard Kennedy <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> ------
> --- linux-2.6.22.1/mm/page-writeback.c.orig 2007-07-30 16:36:09.000000000 +0100
> +++ linux-2.6.22.1/mm/page-writeback.c 2007-07-31 16:26:43.000000000 +0100
> @@ -250,6 +250,8 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a
> pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
> if (pages_written >= write_chunk)
> break; /* We've done our duty */
> + if (!wbc.encountered_congestion && wbc.nr_to_write > 0)
> + break; /* didn't find enough to do */
> }
> congestion_wait(WRITE, HZ/10);
> }
>

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