Christoph,

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 02:14:09PM +0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> Right now ->write_inode has no way to safely return a EAGAIN without explicitly
> redirtying the inode, as we would lose the dirty state otherwise.  Most
> filesystems get this wrong, but XFS makes heavy use of it to avoid blocking
> the flusher thread when ->write_inode hits contentended inode locks.  A
> contended ilock is something XFS can hit very easibly when extending files, as
> the data I/O completion handler takes the lock to update the size, and the
> ->write_inode call can race with it fairly easily if writing enough data
> in one go so that the completion for the first write come in just before
> we call ->write_inode.
> 
> Change the handling of this case to use requeue_io for a quick retry instead
> of redirty_tail, which keeps moving out the dirtied_when data and thus keeps
> delaying the writeout more and more with every failed attempt to get the lock.

Yeah redirty_tail() does have the problem of possibly delay inodes for
too long time. However, you know requeue_io() always has the danger of
triggering busy wb_writeback() loops in corner cases.

For example, nfs_write_inode()/nfs_commit_unstable_pages() often
redirty the inode without doing anything (hence no any progress, a
prerequisite for busy loops) depending on the in flight writes, which
unfortunately further depends on _external_ network/server states..
That means some stalled network/sever state could lead to busy loops
in NFS clients.

The alternative solution may be to firstly apply the attached patch,
and change this one to:

  -			redirty_tail(inode, wb);
  +			requeue_io_wait(inode, wb);

Thanks,
Fengguang

> Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
> 
> Index: linux-2.6/fs/fs-writeback.c
> ===================================================================
> --- linux-2.6.orig/fs/fs-writeback.c	2011-08-26 14:47:42.137050059 +0200
> +++ linux-2.6/fs/fs-writeback.c	2011-08-26 15:06:47.003493601 +0200
> @@ -464,8 +464,18 @@ writeback_single_inode(struct inode *ino
>  			 * operations, such as delayed allocation during
>  			 * submission or metadata updates after data IO
>  			 * completion.
> +			 *
> +			 * For the latter case it is very important to give
> +			 * the inode another turn on b_more_io instead of
> +			 * redirtying it.  Constantly moving dirtied_when
> +			 * forward will prevent us from ever writing out
> +			 * the metadata dirtied in the I/O completion handler.
> +			 *
> +			 * For files on XFS that constantly get appended to
> +			 * calling redirty_tail means they will never get
> +			 * their updated i_size written out.
>  			 */
> -			redirty_tail(inode, wb);
> +			requeue_io(inode, wb);
>  		} else {
>  			/*
>  			 * The inode is clean.  At this point we either have