Hans Reiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I suspect that when someone did the search and replace when creating
> balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr they failed to read the code and
> realize this code path was already effectively ratelimited. The result
> is they made it excessively infrequent (every 1MB if ratelimit is 8) in
> its calling balance_dirty_pages.
?? There's been no change to balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited(). I merely
widened the interface a bit: introduced the new
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr() and did
static inline void
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited(struct address_space *mapping)
{
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr(mapping, 1);
}
That being said, if reiserfs has `number of pages' in hand then yes, it
makes sense to migrate over to balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited_nr().
> If anyone has ever seen this as an actual problem on a real system, I
> would be curious to hear of it.
No, I wouldn't expect it to make much difference.
All that gunk is there just to avoid calling the expensive
get_writeback_state() once per set_page_dirty().
Inaccuracy here will introduce the possibility that we'll transiently dirty
more memory than dirty_ratio permits, but it'll only be a little bit (eight
times the amount of memory which is dirtied per
balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited()
call).
That's a small amount of memory. But if you have 1000 filesystems mounted
and they all do the same thing at the same time, things could get a bit
sticky. Your patch will (greatly) reduce the possibility of even that
scenario.
