linux.git/fs/buffer.c, branch v2.6.24

nobh: nobh_write_end fix

2007-10-21T15:54:05+00:00

This path mustn't have been tested :( I did attempt to exercise it
by injecting failures here, but I suspect PageMappedToDisk may have
been getting in the way. Will need more of a look, although I think
nobh mode is OK for an -rc1 (it shouldn't eat anyone's data).

Commit 03158cd7eb3374843de68421142ca5900df845d9 ("fs: restore nobh")
introcduced a NULL deref.  Spotted by the Coverity checker.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin 
Cc: Badari Pulavarty 
Cc: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: remove pages_skipped accounting in __block_write_full_page()

2007-10-17T15:43:02+00:00

Miklos Szeredi  and me identified a writeback bug:

> The following strange behavior can be observed:
>
> 1. large file is written
> 2. after 30 seconds, nr_dirty goes down by 1024
> 3. then for some time (< 30 sec) nothing happens (disk idle)
> 4. then nr_dirty again goes down by 1024
> 5. repeat from 3. until whole file is written
>
> So basically a 4Mbyte chunk of the file is written every 30 seconds.
> I'm quite sure this is not the intended behavior.

It can be produced by the following test scheme:

# cat bin/test-writeback.sh
grep nr_dirty /proc/vmstat
echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/inode_debug
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/x bs=1K count=204800&
while true; do grep nr_dirty /proc/vmstat; sleep 1; done

# bin/test-writeback.sh
nr_dirty 19207
nr_dirty 19207
nr_dirty 30924
204800+0 records in
204800+0 records out
209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 1.58363 seconds, 132 MB/s
nr_dirty 47150
nr_dirty 47141
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47205
nr_dirty 47214
nr_dirty 47214
nr_dirty 47214
nr_dirty 47214
nr_dirty 47214
nr_dirty 47215
nr_dirty 47216
nr_dirty 47216
nr_dirty 47216
nr_dirty 47154
nr_dirty 47143
nr_dirty 47143
nr_dirty 47143
nr_dirty 47143
nr_dirty 47143
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47142
nr_dirty 47134
nr_dirty 47134
nr_dirty 47135
nr_dirty 47135
nr_dirty 47135
nr_dirty 46097 <== -1038
nr_dirty 46098
nr_dirty 46098
nr_dirty 46098
[...]
nr_dirty 46091
nr_dirty 46092
nr_dirty 46092
nr_dirty 45069 <== -1023
nr_dirty 45056
nr_dirty 45056
nr_dirty 45056
[...]
nr_dirty 37822
nr_dirty 36799 <== -1023
[...]
nr_dirty 36781
nr_dirty 35758 <== -1023
[...]
nr_dirty 34708
nr_dirty 33672 <== -1024
[...]
nr_dirty 33692
nr_dirty 32669 <== -1023

% ls -li /var/x
847824 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 200M 2007-08-12 04:12 /var/x

% dmesg|grep 847824  # generated by a debug printk
[  529.263184] redirtied inode 847824 line 548
[  564.250872] redirtied inode 847824 line 548
[  594.272797] redirtied inode 847824 line 548
[  629.231330] redirtied inode 847824 line 548
[  659.224674] redirtied inode 847824 line 548
[  689.219890] redirtied inode 847824 line 548
[  724.226655] redirtied inode 847824 line 548
[  759.198568] redirtied inode 847824 line 548

# line 548 in fs/fs-writeback.c:
543                 if (wbc->pages_skipped != pages_skipped) {
544                         /*
545                          * writeback is not making progress due to locked
546                          * buffers.  Skip this inode for now.
547                          */
548                         redirty_tail(inode);
549                 }

More debug efforts show that __block_write_full_page()
never has the chance to call submit_bh() for that big dirty file:
the buffer head is *clean*. So basicly no page io is issued by
__block_write_full_page(), hence pages_skipped goes up.

Also the comment in generic_sync_sb_inodes():

544                         /*
545                          * writeback is not making progress due to locked
546                          * buffers.  Skip this inode for now.
547                          */

and the comment in __block_write_full_page():

1713                 /*
1714                  * The page was marked dirty, but the buffers were
1715                  * clean.  Someone wrote them back by hand with
1716                  * ll_rw_block/submit_bh.  A rare case.
1717                  */

do not quite agree with each other. The page writeback should be skipped for
'locked buffer', but here it is 'clean buffer'!

This patch fixes this bug. Though I'm not sure why __block_write_full_page()
is called only to do nothing and who actually issued the writeback for us.

This is the two possible new behaviors after the patch:

1) pretty nice: wait 30s and write ALL:)
2) not so good:
	- during the dd: ~16M
	- after 30s:      ~4M
	- after 5s:       ~4M
	- after 5s:     ~176M

The next patch will fix case (2).

Cc: David Chinner 
Cc: Ken Chen 
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu 
Signed-off-by: David Chinner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: count reclaimable pages per BDI

2007-10-17T15:42:45+00:00

Count per BDI reclaimable pages; nr_reclaimable = nr_dirty + nr_unstable.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Group short-lived and reclaimable kernel allocations

2007-10-16T16:43:00+00:00

This patch marks a number of allocations that are either short-lived such as
network buffers or are reclaimable such as inode allocations.  When something
like updatedb is called, long-lived and unmovable kernel allocations tend to
be spread throughout the address space which increases fragmentation.

This patch groups these allocations together as much as possible by adding a
new MIGRATE_TYPE.  The MIGRATE_RECLAIMABLE type is for allocations that can be
reclaimed on demand, but not moved.  i.e.  they can be migrated by deleting
them and re-reading the information from elsewhere.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Andy Whitcroft 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

fs: restore nobh

2007-10-16T16:42:58+00:00

Implement nobh in new aops.  This is a bit tricky.  FWIW, nobh_truncate is
now implemented in a way that does not create blocks in sparse regions,
which is a silly thing for it to have been doing (isn't it?)

ext2 survives fsx and fsstress. jfs is converted as well... ext3
should be easy to do (but not done yet).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Cc: Badari Pulavarty 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

With reiserfs no longer using the weird generic_cont_expand, remove it completely.

2007-10-16T16:42:56+00:00

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

fs: new cont helpers

2007-10-16T16:42:55+00:00

Rework the generic block "cont" routines to handle the new aops.  Supporting
cont_prepare_write would take quite a lot of code to support, so remove it
instead (and we later convert all filesystems to use it).

write_begin gets passed AOP_FLAG_CONT_EXPAND when called from
generic_cont_expand, so filesystems can avoid the old hacks they used.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin 
Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

fs: introduce write_begin, write_end, and perform_write aops

2007-10-16T16:42:55+00:00

These are intended to replace prepare_write and commit_write with more
flexible alternatives that are also able to avoid the buffered write
deadlock problems efficiently (which prepare_write is unable to do).

[mark.fasheh@oracle.com: API design contributions, code review and fixes]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: various fixes]
[dmonakhov@sw.ru: new aop block_write_begin fix]
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin 
Signed-off-by: Mark Fasheh 
Signed-off-by: Dmitriy Monakhov 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

fs: fix data-loss on error

2007-10-16T16:42:55+00:00

New buffers against uptodate pages are simply be marked uptodate, while the
buffer_new bit remains set.  This causes error-case code to zero out parts of
those buffers because it thinks they contain stale data: wrong, they are
actually uptodate so this is a data loss situation.

Fix this by actually clearning buffer_new and marking the buffer dirty.  It
makes sense to always clear buffer_new before setting a buffer uptodate.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

fs: fix nobh error handling

2007-10-16T16:42:54+00:00

nobh mode error handling is not just pretty slack, it's wrong.

One cannot zero out the whole page to ensure new blocks are zeroed, because
it just brings the whole page "uptodate" with zeroes even if that may not
be the correct uptodate data.  Also, other parts of the page may already
contain dirty data which would get lost by zeroing it out.  Thirdly, the
writeback of zeroes to the new blocks will also erase existing blocks.  All
these conditions are pagecache and/or filesystem corruption.

The problem comes about because we didn't keep track of which buffers
actually are new or old.  However it is not enough just to keep only this
state, because at the point we start dirtying parts of the page (new
blocks, with zeroes), the handling of IO errors becomes impossible without
buffers because the page may only be partially uptodate, in which case the
page flags allone cannot capture the state of the parts of the page.

So allocate all buffers for the page upfront, but leave them unattached so
that they don't pick up any other references and can be freed when we're
done.  If the error path is hit, then zero the new buffers as the regular
buffer path does, then attach the buffers to the page so that it can
actually be written out correctly and be subject to the normal IO error
handling paths.

As an upshot, we save 1K of kernel stack on ia64 or powerpc 64K page
systems.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds