xfs: improve sync behaviour in the face of aggressive dirtying

The following script from Wu Fengguang shows very bad behaviour in XFS
when aggressively dirtying data during a sync on XFS, with sync times
up to almost 10 times as long as ext4.

A large part of the issue is that XFS writes data out itself two times
in the ->sync_fs method, overriding the livelock protection in the core
writeback code, and another issue is the lock-less xfs_ioend_wait call,
which doesn't prevent new ioend from being queue up while waiting for
the count to reach zero.

This patch removes the XFS-internal sync calls and relies on the VFS
to do it's work just like all other filesystems do.  Note that the
i_iocount wait which is rather suboptimal is simply removed here.
We already do it in ->write_inode, which keeps the current supoptimal
behaviour.  We'll eventually need to remove that as well, but that's
material for a separate commit.

------------------------------ snip ------------------------------
#!/bin/sh

umount /dev/sda7
mkfs.xfs -f /dev/sda7
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda7
# mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda7
mount /dev/sda7 /fs

echo $((50<<20)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes

pid=
for i in `seq 10`
do
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/zero-$i bs=1M count=1000 &
	pid="$pid $!"
done

sleep 1

tic=$(date +'%s')
sync
tac=$(date +'%s')

echo
echo sync time: $((tac-tic))
egrep '(Dirty|Writeback|NFS_Unstable)' /proc/meminfo

pidof dd > /dev/null && { kill -9 $pid; echo sync NOT livelocked; }
------------------------------ snip ------------------------------

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reported-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Alex Elder <aelder@sgi.com>
Reviewed-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions