Re: [PATCH 10/10] mm: per device dirty threshold

[Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>]

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 12:19 +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > > > > Ahh, now I see; I had totally blocked out these few lines:
> > > > > 
> > > > > 			pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write;
> > > > > 			if (pages_written >= write_chunk)
> > > > > 				break;		/* We've done our duty */
> > > > > 
> > > > > yeah, those look dubious indeed... And reading back Neil's comments, I
> > > > > think he agrees.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Shall we just kill those?
> > > > 
> > > > I think we should.
> > > > 
> > > > Athough I'm a little afraid, that Akpm will tell me again, that I'm a
> > > > stupid git, and that those lines are in fact vitally important ;)
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > It depends what they're replaced with.
> > > 
> > > That code is there, iirc, to prevent a process from getting stuck in
> > > balance_dirty_pages() forever due to the dirtying activity of other
> > > processes.
> > > 
> > > hm, we ask the process to write write_chunk pages each go around the loop.
> > > So if it wrote write-chunk/2 pages on the first pass it might end up writing
> > > write_chunk*1.5 pages total.  I guess that's rare and doesn't matter much
> > > if it does happen - the upper bound is write_chunk*2-1, I think.
> > 
> > Right, but I think the problem is that its dirty -> writeback, not dirty
> > -> writeback completed.
> > 
> > Ie. they don't guarantee progress, it could be that the total
> > nr_reclaimable + nr_writeback will steadily increase due to this break.
> > 
> > How about ensuring that vm_writeout_total increases least
> > 2*sync_writeback_pages() during our stay in balance_dirty_pages(). That
> > way we have the guarantee that more pages get written out than can be
> > dirtied.
> 
> No, because that's a global counter, which many writers could be
> looking at.
> 
> We'd need a per-task writeout counter, but when finishing the write we
> don't know anymore which task it was performed for.

Yeah, just reached that conclusion myself too - again, I ran into that
when trying to figure out how to do the per task balancing right.

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