Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:19:52 -0400 | From | Theodore Ts'o <> | Subject | Re: Excessive stall times on ext4 in 3.9-rc2 |
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On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 02:50:42PM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote: > > If that is the case, one possible solution that comes to mind would be > > to mark buffer_heads that contain metadata with a flag, so that the > > flusher thread can write them back at the same priority as reads. > > Ext4 is already using REQ_META for this purpose.
We're using REQ_META | REQ_PRIO for reads, not writes.
> I'm surprised that no-one has suggested "change the IO elevator" > yet.....
Well, testing to see if the stalls go away with the noop schedule is a good thing to try just to validate the theory.
The thing is, we do want to make ext4 work well with cfq, and prioritizing non-readahead read requests ahead of data writeback does make sense. The issue is with is that metadata writes going through the block device could in some cases effectively cause a priority inversion when what had previously been an asynchronous writeback starts blocking a foreground, user-visible process.
At least, that's the theory; we should confirm that this is indeed what is causing the data stalls which Mel is reporting on HDD's before we start figuring out how to fix this problem.
- Ted
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