From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263850AbUEGXWl (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 19:22:41 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263860AbUEGXWl (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 19:22:41 -0400 Received: from radius8.csd.net ([204.151.43.208]:1944 "EHLO bastille.tuells.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263850AbUEGXWi (ORCPT ); Fri, 7 May 2004 19:22:38 -0400 Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 17:23:32 -0600 From: marcus hall To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Block device swamping disk cache Message-ID: <20040507232332.GA21230@bastille.tuells.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I am now having problems writing a filesystem image to a device file. I am running an arm version of the 2.5.59 kernel. Writing the data to the device file eventually caused ps.nr_dirty to exceed dirty_thresh in balance_dirty_pages(), yet when writeback_inodes() scans all the superblocks, the inodes that it finds are all marked as memory_backed (they are on a ramdisk), and the inode for the block device file doesn't show up. I did not see any place where mark_inode_dirty() gets called for the block device.. Is there some other mechanism for flushing the disk cache allocated to the device? I end up with balance_dirty_pages() looping forever. Just for grins, I added a call to mark_inode_dirty() in blkdev_commit_write() (similar to generic_commit_write()), but this had no effect that I could notice. I did note that in blkdev_commit_write(), if I look at file->f_dentry->d_inode, I see the inode form the /dev filesystem, yet page->mapping->host is a different inode! I don't know if this is a problem or not, but it did surprise me.. Anyhow, is this a known issue with 2.5.59? How is the disk cache allocated to a block device supposed to get flushed? Thanks! Marcus Hall marcus@tuells.org