Pull core block layer changes from Jens Axboe:
"This is the core block IO pull request for 3.18. Apart from the new
and improved flush machinery for blk-mq, this is all mostly bug fixes
and cleanups.
- blk-mq timeout updates and fixes from Christoph.
- Removal of REQ_END, also from Christoph. We pass it through the
->queue_rq() hook for blk-mq instead, freeing up one of the request
bits. The space was overly tight on 32-bit, so Martin also killed
REQ_KERNEL since it's no longer used.
- blk integrity updates and fixes from Martin and Gu Zheng.
- Update to the flush machinery for blk-mq from Ming Lei. Now we
have a per hardware context flush request, which both cleans up the
code should scale better for flush intensive workloads on blk-mq.
- Improve the error printing, from Rob Elliott.
- Backing device improvements and cleanups from Tejun.
- Fixup of a misplaced rq_complete() tracepoint from Hannes.
- Make blk_get_request() return error pointers, fixing up issues
where we NULL deref when a device goes bad or missing. From Joe
Lawrence.
- Prep work for drastically reducing the memory consumption of dm
devices from Junichi Nomura. This allows creating clone bio sets
without preallocating a lot of memory.
- Fix a blk-mq hang on certain combinations of queue depths and
hardware queues from me.
- Limit memory consumption for blk-mq devices for crash dump
scenarios and drivers that use crazy high depths (certain SCSI
shared tag setups). We now just use a single queue and limited
depth for that"
* 'for-3.18/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-block: (58 commits)
block: Remove REQ_KERNEL
blk-mq: allocate cpumask on the home node
bio-integrity: remove the needless fail handle of bip_slab creating
block: include func name in __get_request prints
block: make blk_update_request print prefix match ratelimited prefix
blk-merge: don't compute bi_phys_segments from bi_vcnt for cloned bio
block: fix alignment_offset math that assumes io_min is a power-of-2
blk-mq: Make bt_clear_tag() easier to read
blk-mq: fix potential hang if rolling wakeup depth is too high
block: add bioset_create_nobvec()
block: use bio_clone_fast() in blk_rq_prep_clone()
block: misplaced rq_complete tracepoint
sd: Honor block layer integrity handling flags
block: Replace strnicmp with strncasecmp
block: Add T10 Protection Information functions
block: Don't merge requests if integrity flags differ
block: Integrity checksum flag
block: Relocate bio integrity flags
block: Add a disk flag to block integrity profile
block: Add prefix to block integrity profile flags
...
Pull percpu updates from Tejun Heo:
"A lot of activities on percpu front. Notable changes are...
- percpu allocator now can take @gfp. If @gfp doesn't contain
GFP_KERNEL, it tries to allocate from what's already available to
the allocator and a work item tries to keep the reserve around
certain level so that these atomic allocations usually succeed.
This will replace the ad-hoc percpu memory pool used by
blk-throttle and also be used by the planned blkcg support for
writeback IOs.
Please note that I noticed a bug in how @gfp is interpreted while
preparing this pull request and applied the fix 6ae833c7fe
("percpu: fix how @gfp is interpreted by the percpu allocator")
just now.
- percpu_ref now uses longs for percpu and global counters instead of
ints. It leads to more sparse packing of the percpu counters on
64bit machines but the overhead should be negligible and this
allows using percpu_ref for refcnting pages and in-memory objects
directly.
- The switching between percpu and single counter modes of a
percpu_ref is made independent of putting the base ref and a
percpu_ref can now optionally be initialized in single or killed
mode. This allows avoiding percpu shutdown latency for cases where
the refcounted objects may be synchronously created and destroyed
in rapid succession with only a fraction of them reaching fully
operational status (SCSI probing does this when combined with
blk-mq support). It's also planned to be used to implement forced
single mode to detect underflow more timely for debugging.
There's a separate branch percpu/for-3.18-consistent-ops which cleans
up the duplicate percpu accessors. That branch causes a number of
conflicts with s390 and other trees. I'll send a separate pull
request w/ resolutions once other branches are merged"
* 'for-3.18' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/percpu: (33 commits)
percpu: fix how @gfp is interpreted by the percpu allocator
blk-mq, percpu_ref: start q->mq_usage_counter in atomic mode
percpu_ref: make INIT_ATOMIC and switch_to_atomic() sticky
percpu_ref: add PERCPU_REF_INIT_* flags
percpu_ref: decouple switching to percpu mode and reinit
percpu_ref: decouple switching to atomic mode and killing
percpu_ref: add PCPU_REF_DEAD
percpu_ref: rename things to prepare for decoupling percpu/atomic mode switch
percpu_ref: replace pcpu_ prefix with percpu_
percpu_ref: minor code and comment updates
percpu_ref: relocate percpu_ref_reinit()
Revert "blk-mq, percpu_ref: implement a kludge for SCSI blk-mq stall during probe"
Revert "percpu: free percpu allocation info for uniprocessor system"
percpu-refcount: make percpu_ref based on longs instead of ints
percpu-refcount: improve WARN messages
percpu: fix locking regression in the failure path of pcpu_alloc()
percpu-refcount: add @gfp to percpu_ref_init()
proportions: add @gfp to init functions
percpu_counter: add @gfp to percpu_counter_init()
percpu_counter: make percpu_counters_lock irq-safe
...
Page reclaim tests zone_is_reclaim_dirty(), but the site that actually
sets this state does zone_set_flag(zone, ZONE_TAIL_LRU_DIRTY), sending the
reader through layers indirection just to track down a simple bit.
Remove all zone flag wrappers and just use bitops against zone->flags
directly. It's just as readable and the lines are barely any longer.
Also rename ZONE_TAIL_LRU_DIRTY to ZONE_DIRTY to match ZONE_WRITEBACK, and
remove the zone_flags_t typedef.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
A block_device may be attached to different gendisks and thus
different bdis over time. bdev_inode_switch_bdi() is used to switch
the associated bdi. The function assumes that the inode could be
dirty and transfers it between bdis if so. This is a bit nasty in
that it reaches into bdi internals.
This patch reimplements the function so that it writes out the inode
if dirty. This is a lot simpler and can be implemented without
exposing bdi internals.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
bdi_destroy() has code to transfer the remaining dirty inodes to the
default_backing_dev_info; however, given the shutdown sequence, it
isn't clear how such condition would happen. Also, it isn't a full
solution as the transferred inodes stlil point to the bdi which is
being destroyed. Operations on those inodes can end up accessing
already released fields such as the percpu stat fields.
Digging through the history, it seems that the code was added as a
quick workaround for a bug report without fully root-causing the
issue. We probably want to remove the code in time but for now let's
add a comment noting that it is a quick workaround.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Canceling of bdi->wb.dwork is currently a bit mushy.
bdi_wb_shutdown() performs cancel_delayed_work_sync() at the end after
shutting down and flushing the delayed_work and bdi_destroy() tries
yet again after bdi_unregister().
bdi->wb.dwork is queued only after checking BDI_registered while
holding bdi->wb_lock and bdi_wb_shutdown() clears the flag while
holding the same lock and then flushes the delayed_work. There's no
way the delayed_work can be queued again after that.
Replace the two unnecessary cancel_delayed_work_sync() invocations
with WARNs on pending. This simplifies and clarifies the code a bit
and will help future changes in further isolating bdi_writeback
handling.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
The only places where NULL test on bdi->dev is used are
bdi_[un]register(). The functions can't be called in parallel anyway
and there's no point in protecting bdi->dev clearing with a lock.
Remove bdi->wb_lock grabbing around bdi->dev clearing and move it
after device_unregister() call so that bdi->dev doesn't have to be
cached in a local variable.
This patch shouldn't introduce any behavior difference.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Percpu allocator now supports allocation mask. Add @gfp to
[flex_]proportions init functions so that !GFP_KERNEL allocation masks
can be used with them too.
This patch doesn't make any functional difference.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Percpu allocator now supports allocation mask. Add @gfp to
percpu_counter_init() so that !GFP_KERNEL allocation masks can be used
with percpu_counters too.
We could have left percpu_counter_init() alone and added
percpu_counter_init_gfp(); however, the number of users isn't that
high and introducing _gfp variants to all percpu data structures would
be quite ugly, so let's just do the conversion. This is the one with
the most users. Other percpu data structures are a lot easier to
convert.
This patch doesn't make any functional difference.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: x86@kernel.org
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
After commit 839a8e8660 ("writeback: replace custom worker pool
implementation with unbound workqueue") when device is removed while we
are writing to it we crash in bdi_writeback_workfn() ->
set_worker_desc() because bdi->dev is NULL.
This can happen because even though bdi_unregister() cancels all pending
flushing work, nothing really prevents new ones from being queued from
balance_dirty_pages() or other places.
Fix the problem by clearing BDI_registered bit in bdi_unregister() and
checking it before scheduling of any flushing work.
Fixes: 839a8e8660
Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Derek Basehore <dbasehore@chromium.org>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed() used the mod_delayed_work() function to
schedule work to writeback dirty inodes. The problem with this is that
it can delay work that is scheduled for immediate execution, such as the
work from sync_inodes_sb(). This can happen since mod_delayed_work()
can now steal work from a work_queue. This fixes the problem by using
queue_delayed_work() instead. This is a regression caused by commit
839a8e8660 ("writeback: replace custom worker pool implementation with
unbound workqueue").
The reason that this causes a problem is that laptop-mode will change
the delay, dirty_writeback_centisecs, to 60000 (10 minutes) by default.
In the case that bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed() races with
sync_inodes_sb(), sync will be stopped for 10 minutes and trigger a hung
task. Even if dirty_writeback_centisecs is not long enough to cause a
hung task, we still don't want to delay sync for that long.
We fix the problem by using queue_delayed_work() when we want to
schedule writeback sometime in future. This function doesn't change the
timer if it is already armed.
For the same reason, we also change bdi_writeback_workfn() to
immediately queue the work again in the case that the work_list is not
empty. The same problem can happen if the sync work is run on the
rescue worker.
[jack@suse.cz: update changelog, add comment, use bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed()]
Signed-off-by: Derek Basehore <dbasehore@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zento.linux.org.uk>
Reviewed-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: "Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Cc: Derek Basehore <dbasehore@chromium.org>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Benson Leung <bleung@chromium.org>
Cc: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@chromium.org>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@chromium.org>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
'*lenp' may be less than "sizeof(kbuf)" so we must check this before the
next copy_to_user().
pdflush_proc_obsolete() is called by sysctl which 'procname' is
"nr_pdflush_threads", if the user passes buffer length less than
"sizeof(kbuf)", it will cause issue.
Signed-off-by: Chen Gang <gang.chen@asianux.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The dev_attrs field of struct class is going away soon, dev_groups
should be used instead. This converts the backing device class code to
use the correct field.
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
A number of parts of the kernel created their own version of this, might
as well have the sysfs core provide it instead.
Reviewed-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Tested-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Calling dev_set_name with a single paramter causes it to be handled as a
format string. Many callers are passing potentially dynamic string
content, so use "%s" in those cases to avoid any potential accidents,
including wrappers like device_create*() and bdi_register().
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
There are cases where userland wants to tweak the priority and
affinity of writeback flushers. Expose bdi_wq to userland by setting
WQ_SYSFS. It appears under /sys/bus/workqueue/devices/writeback/ and
allows adjusting maximum concurrency level, cpumask and nice level.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Writeback implements its own worker pool - each bdi can be associated
with a worker thread which is created and destroyed dynamically. The
worker thread for the default bdi is always present and serves as the
"forker" thread which forks off worker threads for other bdis.
there's no reason for writeback to implement its own worker pool when
using unbound workqueue instead is much simpler and more efficient.
This patch replaces custom worker pool implementation in writeback
with an unbound workqueue.
The conversion isn't too complicated but the followings are worth
mentioning.
* bdi_writeback->last_active, task and wakeup_timer are removed.
delayed_work ->dwork is added instead. Explicit timer handling is
no longer necessary. Everything works by either queueing / modding
/ flushing / canceling the delayed_work item.
* bdi_writeback_thread() becomes bdi_writeback_workfn() which runs off
bdi_writeback->dwork. On each execution, it processes
bdi->work_list and reschedules itself if there are more things to
do.
The function also handles low-mem condition, which used to be
handled by the forker thread. If the function is running off a
rescuer thread, it only writes out limited number of pages so that
the rescuer can serve other bdis too. This preserves the flusher
creation failure behavior of the forker thread.
* INIT_LIST_HEAD(&bdi->bdi_list) is used to tell
bdi_writeback_workfn() about on-going bdi unregistration so that it
always drains work_list even if it's running off the rescuer. Note
that the original code was broken in this regard. Under memory
pressure, a bdi could finish unregistration with non-empty
work_list.
* The default bdi is no longer special. It now is treated the same as
any other bdi and bdi_cap_flush_forker() is removed.
* BDI_pending is no longer used. Removed.
* Some tracepoints become non-applicable. The following TPs are
removed - writeback_nothread, writeback_wake_thread,
writeback_wake_forker_thread, writeback_thread_start,
writeback_thread_stop.
Everything, including devices coming and going away and rescuer
operation under simulated memory pressure, seems to work fine in my
test setup.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
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.
Per Andrew Morton's request, here are the result of using dbench to measure
latencies on ext2:
3.8.0-rc3:
Operation Count AvgLat MaxLat
----------------------------------------
WriteX 109347 0.028 59.817
ReadX 347180 0.004 3.391
Flush 15514 29.828 287.283
Throughput 57.429 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=287.290 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 105556 0.029 4.273
ReadX 335004 0.005 4.112
Flush 14982 30.540 298.634
Throughput 55.4496 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=298.650 ms
As you can see, for ext2 the maximum write latency decreases from ~60ms
on a laptop hard disk to ~4ms. I'm not sure why the flush latencies
increase, though I suspect that being able to dirty pages faster gives
the flusher more work to do.
On ext4, the average write latency decreases as well as all the maximum
latencies:
3.8.0-rc3:
WriteX 85624 0.152 33.078
ReadX 272090 0.010 61.210
Flush 12129 36.219 168.260
Throughput 44.8618 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=168.276 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 86082 0.141 30.928
ReadX 273358 0.010 36.124
Flush 12214 34.800 165.689
Throughput 44.9941 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=165.722 ms
XFS seems to exhibit similar latency improvements as ext2:
3.8.0-rc3:
WriteX 125739 0.028 104.343
ReadX 399070 0.005 4.115
Flush 17851 25.004 131.390
Throughput 66.0024 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=131.406 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 123529 0.028 6.299
ReadX 392434 0.005 4.287
Flush 17549 25.120 188.687
Throughput 64.9113 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=188.704 ms
...and btrfs, just to round things out, also shows some latency
decreases:
3.8.0-rc3:
WriteX 67122 0.083 82.355
ReadX 212719 0.005 2.828
Flush 9547 47.561 147.418
Throughput 35.3391 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=147.433 ms
3.8.0-rc3 + patches:
WriteX 64898 0.101 71.631
ReadX 206673 0.005 7.123
Flush 9190 47.963 219.034
Throughput 34.0795 MB/sec 4 clients 4 procs max_latency=219.044 ms
Before this patchset, all filesystems would block, regardless of whether
or not it was necessary. ext3 would wait, but still generate occasional
checksum errors. The network filesystems were left to do their own
thing, so they'd wait too.
After this patchset, all the disk filesystems except ext3 and btrfs will
wait only if the hardware requires it. ext3 (if necessary) snapshots
pages instead of blocking, and btrfs provides its own bdi so the mm will
never wait. Network filesystems haven't been touched, so either they
provide their own wait code, or they don't block at all. The blocking
behavior is back to what it was before 3.0 if you don't have a disk
requiring stable page writes.
This patchset has been tested on 3.8.0-rc3 on x64 with ext3, ext4, and
xfs. I've spot-checked 3.8.0-rc4 and seem to be getting the same
results as -rc3.
[1] The alternative fixes to ext3 include fixing the locking order and
page bit handling like we did for ext4 (but then why not just use
ext4?), or setting PG_writeback so early that ext3 becomes extremely
slow. I tried that, but the number of write()s I could initiate dropped
by nearly an order of magnitude. That was a bit much even for the
author of the stable page series! :)
This patch:
Creates a per-backing-device flag that tracks whether or not pages must
be held immutable during writeout. Eventually it will be used to waive
wait_for_page_writeback() if nothing requires stable pages.
Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@intel.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind1@gmail.com>
Cc: Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>
Cc: Ron Minnich <rminnich@sandia.gov>
Cc: Latchesar Ionkov <lucho@ionkov.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This reverts commit 8fa72d234d.
People disagree about how this should be done, so let's revert this for
now so that nobody starts using the new tuning interface. Tejun is
thinking about a more generic interface for thread pool affinity.
Requested-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
In realtime environments, it may be desirable to keep the per-bdi
flusher threads from running on certain cpus. This patch adds a
cpu_list file to /sys/class/bdi/* to enable this. The default is to tie
the flusher threads to the same numa node as the backing device (though
I could be convinced to make it a mask of all cpus to avoid a change in
behaviour).
Thanks to Jeremy Eder for the original idea.
Signed-off-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Finally we can kill the 'sync_supers' kernel thread along with the
'->write_super()' superblock operation because all the users are gone.
Now every file-system is supposed to self-manage own superblock and
its dirty state.
The nice thing about killing this thread is that it improves power management.
Indeed, 'sync_supers' is a source of monotonic system wake-ups - it woke up
every 5 seconds no matter what - even if there were no dirty superblocks and
even if there were no file-systems using this service (e.g., btrfs and
journalled ext4 do not need it). So it was wasting power most of the time. And
because the thread was in the core of the kernel, all systems had to have it.
So I am quite happy to make it go away.
Interestingly, this thread is a left-over from the pdflush kernel thread which
was a self-forking kernel thread responsible for all the write-back in old
Linux kernels. It was turned into per-block device BDI threads, and
'sync_supers' was a left-over. Thus, R.I.P, pdflush as well.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Since per-BDI flusher threads were introduced in 2.6, the pdflush
mechanism is not used any more. But the old interface exported through
/proc/sys/vm/nr_pdflush_threads still exists and is obviously useless.
For back-compatibility, printk warning information and return 2 to notify
the users that the interface is removed.
Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li <liwp@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
