Re: [PATCH 03/10] writeback: stop background writeback when belowbackground threshold

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Thu Sep 24 2009 - 11:03:52 EST


On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 16:40 +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> From: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> Treat bdi_start_writeback(0) as a special request to do background write,
> and stop such work when we are below the background dirty threshold.
>
> Also simplify the (nr_pages <= 0) checks. Since we already pass in
> nr_pages=LONG_MAX for WB_SYNC_ALL and background writes, we don't
> need to worry about it being decreased to zero.
>
> Reported-by: Richard Kennedy <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> CC: Jan Kara <jack@xxxxxxx>
> CC: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@xxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---

> @@ -720,20 +730,16 @@ static long wb_writeback(struct bdi_writeback *wb,
>
> for (;;) {
> /*
> + * Stop writeback when nr_pages has been consumed
> */
> + if (args->nr_pages <= 0)
> break;
>
> /*
> + * For background writeout, stop when we are below the
> + * background dirty threshold
> */
> + if (args->for_background && !over_bground_thresh())
> break;


What I'm not getting is why this is conditional on for_background(),
shouldn't we always stop writeback when below the background threshold?

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