Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754262AbYJCESl (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Oct 2008 00:18:41 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750873AbYJCESd (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Oct 2008 00:18:33 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:41519 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750778AbYJCESd (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Oct 2008 00:18:33 -0400 Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2008 21:17:52 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Nick Piggin Cc: Mikulas Patocka , 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: <20081002211752.68994206.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <200810031407.55406.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> References: <20080911101616.GA24064@agk.fab.redhat.com> <200810031347.21586.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> <20081002205604.47910d6d.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <200810031407.55406.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 2.4.8 (GTK+ 2.12.5; x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2820 Lines: 67 On Fri, 3 Oct 2008 14:07:55 +1000 Nick Piggin wrote: > On Friday 03 October 2008 13:56, Andrew Morton wrote: > > On Fri, 3 Oct 2008 13:47:21 +1000 Nick Piggin > wrote: > > > > I expect there's no solution which avoids blocking the writers at some > > > > stage. > > > > > > See my other email. Something roughly like this would do the trick > > > (hey, it actually boots and runs and does fix the problem too). > > > > It needs exclusion to protect all those temp tags. Is do_fsync()'s > > i_mutex sufficient? It's qute unobvious (and unmaintainable?) that all > > the callers of this stuff are running under that lock. > > Yeah... it does need a lock, which I brushed under the carpet :P > I was going to just say use i_mutex, but then we really would start > impacting on other fastpaths (eg writers). > > Possibly a new mutex in the address_space? That's another, umm 24 bytes minimum in the address_space (and inode). That's fairly ouch, which is why Miklaus did that hokey bit-based thing. > That way we can say > "anybody who holds this mutex is allowed to use the tag for anything" > and it doesn't have to be fsync specific (whether that would be of > any use to anything else, I don't know). > > > > > It's ugly because we don't have quite the right radix tree operations > > > yet (eg. lookup multiple tags, set tag X if tag Y was set, proper range > > > lookups). But the theory is to up-front tag the pages that we need to > > > get to disk. > > > > Perhaps some callback-calling radix tree walker. > > Possibly, yes. That would make it fairly general. I'll have a look... > > > > > Completely no impact or slowdown to any writers (although it does add > > > 8 bytes of tags to the radix tree node... but doesn't increase memory > > > footprint as such due to slab). > > > > Can we reduce the amount of copy-n-pasting here? > > Yeah... I went to break the sync/async cases into two, but it looks like > it may not have been worthwhile. Just another branch might be the best > way to go. Yup. Could add another do-this flag in the writeback_control, perhaps. Or even a function pointer. > As far as the c&p in setting the FSYNC tag, yes that should all go away > if the radix-tree is up to scratch. Basically: > > radix_tree_tag_set_if_tagged(start, end, ifWRITEBACK|DIRTY, setFSYNC); > > should be able to replace the whole thing, and we'd hold the tree_lock, so > we would not have to take the page lock etc. Basically it would be much > nicer... even somewhere close to a viable solution. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/