On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 01:52:52PM -0400, Chris Mason wrote:

Have you tried this one:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.file-systems/25560

This bug should cause fragmentation on small files getting forced out
due to memory pressure in ext4.  But, I wasn't able to really
demonstrate it with ext4 on my machine.

I've been able to use compilebench to see the fragmentation problem
very easily.

Annesh has been workign on it, and has some fixes that he queued up.
I'll have to point him at your proposed fix, thanks.  This is what he
came up with in the common code.  What do you think?

						- Ted

(From Annesh, on the linux-ext4 list.)

As I explained in my previous patch the problem is due to pdflush
background_writeout. Now when pdflush does the writeout we may
have only few pages for the file and we would attempt
to write them to disk. So my attempt in the last patch was to
do the below

a) When allocation blocks try to be close to the goal block specified
b) When we call ext4_da_writepages make sure we have minimal nr_to_write
  that ensures we allocate all dirty buffer_heads in a single go.
  nr_to_write is set to 1024 in pdflush background_writeout and that
  would mean we may end up calling some inodes writepages() with really
  small values even though we have more dirty buffer_heads.

What it doesn't handle is
1) File A have 4 dirty buffer_heads.
2) pdflush try to write them. We get 4 contig blocks
3) File A now have new 5 dirty_buffer_heads
4) File B now have 6 dirty_buffer_heads
5) pdflush try to write the 6 dirty buffer_heads of file B and allocate
them next to earlier file A blocks
6) pdflush try to write the 5 dirty buffer_heads of file A and allocate
them after file B blocks resulting in discontinuity.

I am right now testing the below patch which make sure new dirty inodes
are added to the tail of the dirty inode list

commit 6ad9d25595aea8efa0d45c0a2dd28b4a415e34e6
Author: Aneesh Kumar K.V [off-list ref]
Date:   Fri Aug 15 23:19:15 2008 +0530

    move the dirty inodes to the end of the list

diff --git a/fs/fs-writeback.c b/fs/fs-writeback.c
index 25adfc3..91f3c54 100644
--- a/fs/fs-writeback.c
+++ b/fs/fs-writeback.c

@@ -163,7 +163,7 @@ void __mark_inode_dirty(struct inode *inode, int flags)
 		 */
 		if (!was_dirty) {
 			inode->dirtied_when = jiffies;
-			list_move(&inode->i_list, &sb->s_dirty);
+			list_move_tail(&inode->i_list, &sb->s_dirty);
 		}
 	}
 out: