On Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:42:35 -0800
"Darrick J. Wong" [off-list ref] wrote:

This patchset ("stable page writes, part 2") makes some key modifications to
the original 'stable page writes' patchset.  First, it provides creators
(devices and filesystems) of a backing_dev_info a flag that declares whether or
not it is necessary to ensure that page contents cannot change during writeout.
It is no longer assumed that this is true of all devices (which was never true
anyway).  Second, the flag is used to relaxed the wait_on_page_writeback calls
so that wait only occurs if the device needs it.  Third, it fixes up the
remaining disk-backed filesystems to use this improved conditional-wait logic
to provide stable page writes on those filesystems.

It is hoped that (for people not using checksumming devices, anyway) this
patchset will give back unnecessary performance decreases since the original
stable page write patchset went into 3.0.  Sorry about not fixing it sooner.

Complaints were registered by several people about the long write latencies
introduced by the original stable page write patchset.  Generally speaking, the
kernel ought to allocate as little extra memory as possible to facilitate
writeout, but for people who simply cannot wait, a second page stability
strategy is (re)introduced: snapshotting page contents.  The waiting behavior
is still the default strategy; to enable page snapshotting, a superblock flag
(MS_SNAP_STABLE) must be set.  This flag is used to bandaid^Henable stable page
writeback on ext3[1], and is not used anywhere else.

Given that there are already a few storage devices and network FSes that have
rolled their own page stability wait/page snapshot code, it would be nice to
move towards consolidating all of these.  It seems possible that iscsi and
raid5 may wish to use the new stable page write support to enable zero-copy
writeout.

Thank you to Jan Kara for helping fix a couple more filesystems.

I have to say that 3d08bcc887 ("mm: Wait for writeback when grabbing
pages to begin a write") was a massive faceplant.  How the heck did that
happen?

Looking back at the 19 May 2011 patchset, I see that we all managed to
avoid cc'ing the guy who wrote and designed that code and who introduced
the PageWriteback/wait_on_page_writeback() infrastructure to avoid exactly
the problem which 3d08bcc887 added.  Sigh.

This patchset has been tested on 3.8.0-rc3 on x64 with ext3, ext4, and xfs.
What does everyone think about queueing this for 3.9?

This patchset lacks any performance testing results.


The patchset looks OK to me, but one thing I find unclear:

For clarity's sake, please provide a description of which filesystems
(and under which circumstances) will block behind writeback when
userspace is attempting to dirty a page.  Both before and, particularly,
after this patchset.  IOW, did everything get fixed?