linux.git/fs/sync.c, branch v3.13

Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew Morton)

2013-11-13T06:45:43+00:00

Merge first patch-bomb from Andrew Morton:
 "Quite a lot of other stuff is banked up awaiting further
  next->mainline merging, but this batch contains:

   - Lots of random misc patches
   - OCFS2
   - Most of MM
   - backlight updates
   - lib/ updates
   - printk updates
   - checkpatch updates
   - epoll tweaking
   - rtc updates
   - hfs
   - hfsplus
   - documentation
   - procfs
   - update gcov to gcc-4.7 format
   - IPC"

* emailed patches from Andrew Morton : (269 commits)
  ipc, msg: fix message length check for negative values
  ipc/util.c: remove unnecessary work pending test
  devpts: plug the memory leak in kill_sb
  ./Makefile: export initial ramdisk compression config option
  init/Kconfig: add option to disable kernel compression
  drivers: w1: make w1_slave::flags long to avoid memory corruption
  drivers/w1/masters/ds1wm.cuse dev_get_platdata()
  drivers/memstick/core/ms_block.c: fix unreachable state in h_msb_read_page()
  drivers/memstick/core/mspro_block.c: fix attributes array allocation
  drivers/pps/clients/pps-gpio.c: remove redundant of_match_ptr
  kernel/panic.c: reduce 1 byte usage for print tainted buffer
  gcov: reuse kbasename helper
  kernel/gcov/fs.c: use pr_warn()
  kernel/module.c: use pr_foo()
  gcov: compile specific gcov implementation based on gcc version
  gcov: add support for gcc 4.7 gcov format
  gcov: move gcov structs definitions to a gcc version specific file
  kernel/taskstats.c: return -ENOMEM when alloc memory fails in add_del_listener()
  kernel/taskstats.c: add nla_nest_cancel() for failure processing between nla_nest_start() and nla_nest_end()
  kernel/sysctl_binary.c: use scnprintf() instead of snprintf()
  ...

writeback: do not sync data dirtied after sync start

2013-11-13T03:09:07+00:00

When there are processes heavily creating small files while sync(2) is
running, it can easily happen that quite some new files are created
between WB_SYNC_NONE and WB_SYNC_ALL pass of sync(2).  That can happen
especially if there are several busy filesystems (remember that sync
traverses filesystems sequentially and waits in WB_SYNC_ALL phase on one
fs before starting it on another fs).  Because WB_SYNC_ALL pass is slow
(e.g.  causes a transaction commit and cache flush for each inode in
ext3), resulting sync(2) times are rather large.

The following script reproduces the problem:

  function run_writers
  {
    for (( i = 0; i < 10; i++ )); do
      mkdir $1/dir$i
      for (( j = 0; j < 40000; j++ )); do
        dd if=/dev/zero of=$1/dir$i/$j bs=4k count=4 &>/dev/null
      done &
    done
  }

  for dir in "$@"; do
    run_writers $dir
  done

  sleep 40
  time sync

Fix the problem by disregarding inodes dirtied after sync(2) was called
in the WB_SYNC_ALL pass.  To allow for this, sync_inodes_sb() now takes
a time stamp when sync has started which is used for setting up work for
flusher threads.

To give some numbers, when above script is run on two ext4 filesystems
on simple SATA drive, the average sync time from 10 runs is 267.549
seconds with standard deviation 104.799426.  With the patched kernel,
the average sync time from 10 runs is 2.995 seconds with standard
deviation 0.096.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Reviewed-by: Fengguang Wu 
Reviewed-by: Dave Chinner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

file->f_op is never NULL...

2013-10-25T03:34:54+00:00

Signed-off-by: Al Viro

teach SYSCALL_DEFINE how to deal with long long/unsigned long long

2013-03-04T03:46:22+00:00

... and convert a bunch of SYSCALL_DEFINE ones to SYSCALL_DEFINE,
killing the boilerplate crap around them.

Signed-off-by: Al Viro

new helper: file_inode(file)

2013-02-23T04:31:31+00:00

Signed-off-by: Al Viro

switch simple cases of fget_light to fdget

2012-09-27T02:20:08+00:00

Signed-off-by: Al Viro

vfs: Avoid unnecessary WB_SYNC_NONE writeback during sys_sync and reorder sync passes

2012-07-22T19:59:01+00:00

wakeup_flusher_threads(0) will queue work doing complete writeback for each
flusher thread. Thus there is not much point in submitting another work doing
full inode WB_SYNC_NONE writeback by writeback_inodes_sb().

After this change it does not make sense to call nonblocking ->sync_fs and
block device flush before calling sync_inodes_sb() because
wakeup_flusher_threads() is completely asynchronous and thus these functions
would be called in parallel with inode writeback running which will effectively
void any work they do. So we move sync_inodes_sb() call before these two
functions.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

vfs: Remove unnecessary flushing of block devices

2012-07-22T19:58:53+00:00

It is not necessary to write block devices twice. The reason why we first did
flush and then proper sync is that
  for_each_bdev() {
    write_bdev()
    wait_for_completion()
  }
is much slower than
  for_each_bdev()
    write_bdev()
  for_each_bdev()
    wait_for_completion()
when there is bigger amount of data. But as is seen in the above, there's no real
need to scan pages and submit them twice. We just need to separate the submission
and waiting part. This patch does that.

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

vfs: Make sys_sync writeout also block device inodes

2012-07-22T19:58:49+00:00

In case block device does not have filesystem mounted on it, sys_sync will just
ignore it and doesn't writeout its dirty pages. This is because writeback code
avoids writing inodes from superblock without backing device and
blockdev_superblock is such a superblock.  Since it's unexpected that sync
doesn't writeout dirty data for block devices be nice to users and change the
behavior to do so. So now we iterate over all block devices on blockdev_super
instead of iterating over all superblocks when syncing block devices.

Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro

vfs: Reorder operations during sys_sync

2012-07-22T19:58:41+00:00

Change the order of operations during sync from

for_each_sb {
        writeback_inodes_sb();
        sync_fs(nowait);
        __sync_blockdev(nowait);
}
for_each_sb {
        sync_inodes_sb();
        sync_fs(wait);
        __sync_blockdev(wait);
}

to

for_each_sb
        writeback_inodes_sb();
for_each_sb
        sync_fs(nowait);
for_each_sb
        __sync_blockdev(nowait);
for_each_sb
        sync_inodes_sb();
for_each_sb
        sync_fs(wait);
for_each_sb
        __sync_blockdev(wait);

This is a preparation for the following patches in this series.

Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig 
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro