On 09/20/2007 06:36 PM, Andrew Morton wrote: > > So the question is, why do we have large amounts of dirty pages for one > disk which appear to be sitting there not getting written? > > Do we know if there's any writeout at all happening when the system is in > this state? > > I guess it's possible that the dirty inodes on the "other" disk got > themselves onto the wrong per-sb inode list, or are on the correct list, > but in the correct place. If so, these: > > writeback-fix-time-ordering-of-the-per-superblock-dirty-inode-lists.patch > writeback-fix-time-ordering-of-the-per-superblock-dirty-inode-lists-2.patch > writeback-fix-time-ordering-of-the-per-superblock-dirty-inode-lists-3.patch > writeback-fix-time-ordering-of-the-per-superblock-dirty-inode-lists-4.patch > writeback-fix-comment-use-helper-function.patch > writeback-fix-time-ordering-of-the-per-superblock-dirty-inode-lists-5.patch > writeback-fix-time-ordering-of-the-per-superblock-dirty-inode-lists-6.patch > writeback-fix-time-ordering-of-the-per-superblock-dirty-inode-lists-7.patch > writeback-fix-periodic-superblock-dirty-inode-flushing.patch > > from 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 should help.
Yikes! Simple fixes would be better. Patch that is confirmed to fix the problem for this user is below, but that one could cause other problems. I was looking for some band-aid could be shown to be harmless... http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/2/89: ------ --- linux-2.6.22.1/mm/page-writeback.c.orig 2007-07-30 16:36:09.000000000 +0100 +++ linux-2.6.22.1/mm/page-writeback.c 2007-07-31 16:26:43.000000000 +0100 @@ -250,6 +250,8 @@ static void balance_dirty_pages(struct a pages_written += write_chunk - wbc.nr_to_write; if (pages_written >= write_chunk) break; /* We've done our duty */ + if (!wbc.encountered_congestion && wbc.nr_to_write > 0) + break; /* didn't find enough to do */ } congestion_wait(WRITE, HZ/10); } > > Did anyone try running /bin/sync when the system is in this state? > Reporter is in the CC: list. - 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/
