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authorJeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>2009-04-02 16:56:37 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-04-02 19:04:48 -0700
commitd2caa3c549c74d6476e2c29e13bd4d0e7d21c7fe (patch)
tree8bdaf6ababcd789ced0f441fd9503ee8e033d242 /mm/vmstat.c
parent846c151a4de188bb8f7043097518dab2ff5b5c2c (diff)
writeback: guard against jiffies wraparound on inode->dirtied_when checks (try #3)
The dirtied_when value on an inode is supposed to represent the first time that an inode has one of its pages dirtied. This value is in units of jiffies. It's used in several places in the writeback code to determine when to write out an inode. The problem is that these checks assume that dirtied_when is updated periodically. If an inode is continuously being used for I/O it can be persistently marked as dirty and will continue to age. Once the time compared to is greater than or equal to half the maximum of the jiffies type, the logic of the time_*() macros inverts and the opposite of what is needed is returned. On 32-bit architectures that's just under 25 days (assuming HZ == 1000). As the least-recently dirtied inode, it'll end up being the first one that pdflush will try to write out. sync_sb_inodes does this check: /* Was this inode dirtied after sync_sb_inodes was called? */ if (time_after(inode->dirtied_when, start)) break; ...but now dirtied_when appears to be in the future. sync_sb_inodes bails out without attempting to write any dirty inodes. When this occurs, pdflush will stop writing out inodes for this superblock. Nothing can unwedge it until jiffies moves out of the problematic window. This patch fixes this problem by changing the checks against dirtied_when to also check whether it appears to be in the future. If it does, then we consider the value to be far in the past. This should shrink the problematic window of time to such a small period (30s) as not to matter. Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Acked-by: Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net> Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/vmstat.c')
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