Excerpts from Dave Chinner's message of 2011-03-09 16:51:48 -0500:
> On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 01:44:24PM -0600, Steve French wrote:
> > Have alternative approaches, other than using wait_on_page_writeback,
> > been considered for solving the stable page write problem in similar
> > cases (since only about 1 out of 5 linux file systems uses this call
> > today).
>
> I think that is incorrect. write_cache_pages() does:
>
> 929 lock_page(page);
> .....
> 950 if (PageWriteback(page)) {
> 951 if (wbc->sync_mode != WB_SYNC_NONE)
> 952 wait_on_page_writeback(page);
> 953 else
> 954 goto continue_unlock;
> 955 }
> 956
> 957 BUG_ON(PageWriteback(page));
> 958 if (!clear_page_dirty_for_io(page))
> 959 goto continue_unlock;
> 960
> 961 trace_wbc_writepage(wbc,
> mapping->backing_dev_info);
> 962 ret = (*writepage)(page, wbc, data);
>
> so every filesystem using the generic_writepages code already does
> this check and wait before .writepage is called. Hence only the
> filesystems that do not use generic_writepages() or
> mpage_writepages() need a specific check, and that means most
> filesystems are actually waiting on writeback pages correctly.
But checking here just means we don't start writeback on a page that is
writeback, which is a good idea but not really related to stable pages?
stable pages means we don't let mmap'd pages or file_write muck around
with the pages while they are in writeback, so we need to wait in
file_write and page_mkwrite.
-chris
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