Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757434Ab0FOLBK (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:01:10 -0400 Received: from bombadil.infradead.org ([18.85.46.34]:59154 "EHLO bombadil.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756154Ab0FOLBI (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:01:08 -0400 Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:01:02 -0400 From: Christoph Hellwig To: Rik van Riel Cc: Dave Chinner , Andrew Morton , Mel Gorman , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, Chris Mason , Nick Piggin , Johannes Weiner , Christoph Hellwig , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Subject: Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch Message-ID: <20100615110102.GD31051@infradead.org> References: <1276514273-27693-1-git-send-email-mel@csn.ul.ie> <1276514273-27693-12-git-send-email-mel@csn.ul.ie> <20100614231144.GG6590@dastard> <20100614162143.04783749.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20100615003943.GK6590@dastard> <4C16D46D.3020302@redhat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4C16D46D.3020302@redhat.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-08-17) X-SRS-Rewrite: SMTP reverse-path rewritten from by bombadil.infradead.org See http://www.infradead.org/rpr.html Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1142 Lines: 25 On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 09:16:29PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote: > >Besides, there really isn't the right context in the block layer to > >be able to queue and prioritise large amounts of IO without > >significant penalties to some higher layer operation. > > Can we kick flushing for the whole inode at once from > vmscan.c? kswapd really should be a last effort tool to clean filesystem pages. If it does enough I/O for this to matter significantly we need to fix the VM to move more work to the flusher threads instead of trying to fix kswapd. > Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" > way to call the filesystem flushing threads? We already have that API, in Jens' latest tree that's sync_inodes_sb/writeback_inodes_sb. We could also add a non-waiting variant if required, but I think the big problem with kswapd is that we want to wait on I/O completion under circumstances. -- 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/