linux-stable.git/mm/page-writeback.c, branch linux-3.8.y

mm: fix calculation of dirtyable memory

2012-12-21T01:40:18+00:00

The system uses global_dirtyable_memory() to calculate number of
dirtyable pages/pages that can be allocated to the page cache.  A bug
causes an underflow thus making the page count look like a big unsigned
number.  This in turn confuses the dirty writeback throttling to
aggressively write back pages as they become dirty (usually 1 page at a
time).  This generally only affects systems with highmem because the
underflowed count gets subtracted from the global count of dirtyable
memory.

The problem was introduced with v3.2-4896-gab8fabd

Fix is to ensure we don't get an underflowed total of either highmem or
global dirtyable memory.

Signed-off-by: Sonny Rao 
Signed-off-by: Puneet Kumar 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Tested-by: Damien Wyart 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: remove nr_pages_dirtied arg from balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr()

2012-12-12T01:22:21+00:00

There is no reason to pass the nr_pages_dirtied argument, because
nr_pages_dirtied value from the caller is unused in
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr().

Signed-off-by: Namjae Jeon 
Signed-off-by: Vivek Trivedi 
Cc: Wu Fengguang 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

CPU hotplug, writeback: Don't call writeback_set_ratelimit() too often during hotplug

2012-09-28T12:27:49+00:00

The CPU hotplug callback related to writeback calls writeback_set_ratelimit()
during every state change in the hotplug sequence. This is unnecessary
since num_online_cpus() changes only once during the entire hotplug operation.

So invoke the function only once per hotplug, thereby avoiding the
unnecessary repetition of those costly calculations.

Signed-off-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat

vfs: kill write_super and sync_supers

2012-08-03T21:24:44+00:00

Finally we can kill the 'sync_supers' kernel thread along with the
'->write_super()' superblock operation because all the users are gone.
Now every file-system is supposed to self-manage own superblock and
its dirty state.

The nice thing about killing this thread is that it improves power management.
Indeed, 'sync_supers' is a source of monotonic system wake-ups - it woke up
every 5 seconds no matter what - even if there were no dirty superblocks and
even if there were no file-systems using this service (e.g., btrfs and
journalled ext4 do not need it). So it was wasting power most of the time. And
because the thread was in the core of the kernel, all systems had to have it.
So I am quite happy to make it go away.

Interestingly, this thread is a left-over from the pdflush kernel thread which
was a self-forking kernel thread responsible for all the write-back in old
Linux kernels. It was turned into per-block device BDI threads, and
'sync_supers' was a left-over. Thus, R.I.P, pdflush as well.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

writeback: Fix some comment errors

2012-06-09T11:54:47+00:00

Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li 
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu

block: Convert BDI proportion calculations to flexible proportions

2012-06-08T23:37:56+00:00

Convert calculations of proportion of writeback each bdi does to new flexible
proportion code. That allows us to use aging period of fixed wallclock time
which gives better proportion estimates given the hugely varying throughput of
different devices.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra 
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu

writeback: initialize global_dirty_limit

2012-05-06T05:41:58+00:00

This prevents global_dirty_limit from remaining 0 (the initial value)
for long time, since it's only updated in update_dirty_limit() when
above the dirty freerun area.

It will avoid unexpected consequences when some random code use it as a
convenient approximation of the global dirty threshold.

Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu

mm: page-writeback.c: local functions should not be exposed globally

2012-04-14T09:37:27+00:00

The function global_dirtyable_memory is only referenced in this file and
should be marked static to prevent it from being exposed globally.

This quiets the sparse warning:

warning: symbol 'global_dirtyable_memory' was not declared. Should it be static?

Signed-off-by: H Hartley Sweeten 
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu

Merge tag 'ext4_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4

2012-03-28T17:02:55+00:00

Pull ext4 updates for 3.4 from Ted Ts'o:
 "Ext4 commits for 3.3 merge window; mostly cleanups and bug fixes

  The changes to export dirty_writeback_interval are from Artem's s_dirt
  cleanup patch series.  The same is true of the change to remove the
  s_dirt helper functions which never got used by anyone in-tree.  I've
  run these changes by Al Viro, and am carrying them so that Artem can
  more easily fix up the rest of the file systems during the next merge
  window.  (Originally we had hopped to remove the use of s_dirt from
  ext4 during this merge window, but his patches had some bugs, so I
  ultimately ended dropping them from the ext4 tree.)"

* tag 'ext4_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4: (66 commits)
  vfs: remove unused superblock helpers
  mm: export dirty_writeback_interval
  ext4: remove useless s_dirt assignment
  ext4: write superblock only once on unmount
  ext4: do not mark superblock as dirty unnecessarily
  ext4: correct ext4_punch_hole return codes
  ext4: remove restrictive checks for EOFBLOCKS_FL
  ext4: always set then trimmed blocks count into len
  ext4: fix trimmed block count accunting
  ext4: fix start and len arguments handling in ext4_trim_fs()
  ext4: update s_free_{inodes,blocks}_count during online resize
  ext4: change some printk() calls to use ext4_msg() instead
  ext4: avoid output message interleaving in ext4_error_()
  ext4: remove trailing newlines from ext4_msg() and ext4_error() messages
  ext4: add no_printk argument validation, fix fallout
  ext4: remove redundant "EXT4-fs: " from uses of ext4_msg
  ext4: give more helpful error message in ext4_ext_rm_leaf()
  ext4: remove unused code from ext4_ext_map_blocks()
  ext4: rewrite punch hole to use ext4_ext_remove_space()
  jbd2: cleanup journal tail after transaction commit
  ...

mm: export dirty_writeback_interval

2012-03-22T02:33:00+00:00

Export 'dirty_writeback_interval' to make it visible to
file-systems. We are going to push superblock management down to
file-systems and get rid of the 'sync_supers' kernel thread completly.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy 
Cc: Al Viro 
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o"