On Tue 20-11-12 15:02:15, Jeff Moyer wrote:

Jan Kara [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

@@ -1279,6 +1280,9 @@ struct ext4_sb_info {
 	/* workqueue for dio unwritten */
 	struct workqueue_struct *dio_unwritten_wq;
 
+	/* workqueue for aio+dio+o_sync disk cache flushing */
+	struct workqueue_struct *aio_dio_flush_wq;
+

  Umm, I'm not completely decided whether we really need a separate
workqueue. But it doesn't cost too much so I guess it makes some sense -
fsync() is rather heavy so syncing won't starve extent conversion...

I'm assuming you'd like me to convert the names from flush to fsync,
yes?

  Would be nicer, yes.

quoted

quoted

+
+	/*
+	 * If we are running in nojournal mode, just flush the disk
+	 * cache and return.
+	 */
+	if (!journal)
+		return blkdev_issue_flush(inode->i_sb->s_bdev, GFP_NOIO, NULL);

  And this is wrong as well - you need to do work similar to what
ext4_sync_file() does. Actually it would be *much* better if these two
sites used the same helper function. Which also poses an interesting
question about locking - do we need i_mutex or not? Forcing a transaction
commit is definitely OK without it, similarly as grabbing transaction ids
from inode or ext4_should_journal_data() test. __sync_inode() call seems
to be OK without i_mutex as well so I believe we can just get rid of it
(getting i_mutex from the workqueue is a locking nightmare we don't want to
return to).

Just to be clear, are you saying you would like me to remove the
mutex_lock/unlock pair from ext4_sync_file?  (I had already factored out
the common code between this new code path and the fsync path in my tree.)

  Yes, after some thinking I came to that conclusion. We actually need to
keep i_mutex around ext4_flush_unwritten_io() to avoid livelocks but the
rest doesn't need it. The change should be definitely a separate patch just
in case there's something subtle I missed and we need to bisect in
future... I've attached a patch for that so that blame for bugs goes my way
;) Compile tested only so far. I'll give it some more testing overnight.

								Honza
-- 
Jan Kara [off-list ref]
SUSE Labs, CR