Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 19:40:34 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-mm@vger.kernel.org, agk@redhat.com, mbroz@redhat.com,
       chris@arachsys.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Memory management livelock
Message-Id: <20081002194034.7957bccb.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <200810031232.23836.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
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	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0809231817390.11559@hs20-bc2-1.build.redhat.com>
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	<200810031232.23836.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
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On Fri, 3 Oct 2008 12:32:23 +1000 Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> > yup, that's pretty much unfixable, really, unless new locks are added
> > which block threads which are writing to unrelated sections of the
> > file, and that could hurt some workloads quite a lot, I expect.
> 
> Why is it unfixable? Just ignore nr_to_write, and write out everything
> properly, I would have thought.

That can cause fsync to wait arbitrarily long if some other process is
writing the file.  This happens.
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