writeback: introduce writeback_control.more_io to indicate more io

After making dirty a 100M file, the normal behavior is to start the writeback
for all data after 30s delays.  But sometimes the following happens instead:

	- after 30s:    ~4M
	- after 5s:     ~4M
	- after 5s:     all remaining 92M

Some analyze shows that the internal io dispatch queues goes like this:

		s_io            s_more_io
		-------------------------
	1)	100M,1K         0
	2)	1K              96M
	3)	0               96M

1) initial state with a 100M file and a 1K file
2) 4M written, nr_to_write <= 0, so write more
3) 1K written, nr_to_write > 0, no more writes(BUG)

nr_to_write > 0 in (3) fools the upper layer to think that data have all been
written out.  The big dirty file is actually still sitting in s_more_io.  We
cannot simply splice s_more_io back to s_io as soon as s_io becomes empty, and
let the loop in generic_sync_sb_inodes() continue: this may starve newly
expired inodes in s_dirty.  It is also not an option to draw inodes from both
s_more_io and s_dirty, an let the loop go on: this might lead to live locks,
and might also starve other superblocks in sync time(well kupdate may still
starve some superblocks, that's another bug).

We have to return when a full scan of s_io completes.  So nr_to_write > 0 does
not necessarily mean that "all data are written".  This patch introduces a
flag writeback_control.more_io to indicate this situation.  With it the big
dirty file no longer has to wait for the next kupdate invocation 5s later.

Cc: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: Ken Chen <kenchen@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/writeback.h b/include/linux/writeback.h
index 52be879793ed..1200868a5dee 100644
--- a/include/linux/writeback.h
+++ b/include/linux/writeback.h
@@ -62,6 +62,7 @@ struct writeback_control {
 	unsigned for_reclaim:1;		/* Invoked from the page allocator */
 	unsigned for_writepages:1;	/* This is a writepages() call */
 	unsigned range_cyclic:1;	/* range_start is cyclic */
+	unsigned more_io:1;		/* more io to be dispatched */
 };
 
 /*