For a long time now the kernel has been moving away from using the
pdflush daemon to write 'old' dirty pages to disk. The primary reason
for this is because the pdflush daemon is single threaded and can be
a limiting factor for performance. Since pdflush sequentially walks
the dirty inode list for each super block any delay in processing can
slow down dirty page writeback for all filesystems.
The replacement for pdflush is called bdi (backing device info). The
bdi system involves creating a per-filesystem control structure each
with its own private sets of queues to manage writeback. The advantage
is greater parallelism which improves performance and prevents a single
filesystem from slowing writeback to the others.
For a long time both systems co-existed in the kernel so it wasn't
strictly required to implement the bdi scheme. However, as of
Linux 2.6.36 kernels the pdflush functionality has been retired.
Since ZFS already bypasses the page cache for most I/O this is only
an issue for mmap(2) writes which must go through the page cache.
Even then adding this missing support for newer kernels was overlooked
because there are other mechanisms which can trigger writeback.
However, there is one critical case where not implementing the bdi
functionality can cause problems. If an application handles a page
fault it can enter the balance_dirty_pages() callpath. This will
result in the application hanging until the number of dirty pages in
the system drops below the dirty ratio.
Without a registered backing_device_info for the filesystem the
dirty pages will not get written out. Thus the application will hang.
As mentioned above this was less of an issue with older kernels because
pdflush would eventually write out the dirty pages.
This change adds a backing_device_info structure to the zfs_sb_t
which is already allocated per-super block. It is then registered
when the filesystem mounted and unregistered on unmount. It will
not be registered for mounted snapshots which are read-only. This
change will result in flush-<pool> thread being dynamically created
and destroyed per-mounted filesystem for writeback.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#174
The inode eviction should unmap the pages associated with the inode.
These pages should also be flushed to disk to avoid the data loss.
Therefore, use truncate_setsize() in evict_inode() to release the
pagecache.
The API truncate_setsize() was added in 2.6.35 kernel. To ensure
compatibility with the old kernel, the patch defines its own
truncate_setsize function.
Signed-off-by: Prasad Joshi <pjoshi@stec-inc.com>
Closes#255
How nfsd handles .fsync() has been changed a couple of times in the
recent kernels. But basically there are three cases we need to
consider.
Linux 2.6.12 - 2.6.33
* The .fsync() hook takes 3 arguments
* The nfsd will call .fsync() with a NULL file struct pointer.
Linux 2.6.34
* The .fsync() hook takes 3 arguments
* The nfsd no longer calls .fsync() but instead used sync_inode()
Linux 2.6.35 - 2.6.x
* The .fsync() hook takes 2 arguments
* The nfsd no longer calls .fsync() but instead used sync_inode()
For once it looks like we've gotten lucky. The first two cases can
actually be collased in to one if we stop using the file struct
pointer entirely. Since the dentry is still passed in both cases
this is possible. The last case can then be safely handled by
unconditionally using the dentry in the file struct pointer now
that we know the nfsd caller has been removed.
Closes#230
Added insert_inode_locked() helper function, prior to this most callers
used insert_inode_hash(). The older method doesn't check for collisions
in the inode_hashtable but it still acceptible for use. Fallback to
using insert_inode_hash() when insert_inode_locked() is unavailable.
The fsync() callback in the file_operations structure used to take
3 arguments. The callback now only takes 2 arguments because the
dentry argument was determined to be unused by all consumers. To
handle this a compatibility prototype was added to ensure the right
prototype is used. Our implementation never used the dentry argument
either so it's just a matter of using the right prototype.
