Hello Andrew, I found a suspicious bug of I/O accounting in 2.6.20-rc6-mm3. The number of dirty pages per backing_dev available from /sys/block/<dev>/queue/nr_dirty keeps growing when a file is rapidly overwritten several times.
For example: % cat /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_dirty 104 % for i in 1 2; do dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy bs=4096 count=1; done; sync % cat /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_dirty 105 % for i in 1 2 3; do dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy bs=4096 count=1; done; sync % cat /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_dirty 107 This patch fixes it. Signed-off-by: Tomoki Sekiyama <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --- mm/truncate.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) Index: linux-2.6.20-rc6-mm3/mm/truncate.c =================================================================== --- linux-2.6.20-rc6-mm3.orig/mm/truncate.c +++ linux-2.6.20-rc6-mm3/mm/truncate.c @@ -70,6 +70,7 @@ void cancel_dirty_page(struct page *page if (TestClearPageDirty(page)) { struct address_space *mapping = page->mapping; if (mapping && mapping_cap_account_dirty(mapping)) { + atomic_long_dec(&mapping->backing_dev_info->nr_dirty); dec_zone_page_state(page, NR_FILE_DIRTY); if (account_size) task_io_account_cancelled_write(account_size); - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/