On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 11:08:25PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 11:03:25PM +0530, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote:

quoted

With the below changes we reserve credit needed to insert only one extent
resulting from a call to single get_block. That make sure we don't take
too much journal credits during writeout. We also don't limit the pages
to write. That means we loop through the dirty pages building largest
possible contiguous block request. Then we issue a single get_block request.
We may get less block that we requested. If so we would end up not mapping
some of the buffer_heads. That means those buffer_heads are still marked delay.
Later in the writepage callback via __mpage_writepage we redirty those pages.

If you're only redirtying the pages in the callback, that means they
are left clean but with the delayed flag set; is that going to be
enough to keep the mm from dropping the pages because they are clean?
Or is the mechanism which prevents this is that you've kept the
refcount on the pages bumped until after the callback?

writepages can use redirty_page_for_writepage to skip the pages during
writeout. We do that in most of the writepage call backs.
So I guess they would be properly marked dirty .

-aneesh