mm: implement writeback livelock avoidance using page tagging

We try to avoid livelocks of writeback when some steadily creates dirty
pages in a mapping we are writing out.  For memory-cleaning writeback,
using nr_to_write works reasonably well but we cannot really use it for
data integrity writeback.  This patch tries to solve the problem.

The idea is simple: Tag all pages that should be written back with a
special tag (TOWRITE) in the radix tree.  This can be done rather quickly
and thus livelocks should not happen in practice.  Then we start doing the
hard work of locking pages and sending them to disk only for those pages
that have TOWRITE tag set.

Note: Adding new radix tree tag grows radix tree node from 288 to 296
bytes for 32-bit archs and from 552 to 560 bytes for 64-bit archs.
However, the number of slab/slub items per page remains the same (13 and 7
respectively).

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/radix-tree.h b/include/linux/radix-tree.h
index a4b00e9cca90..634b8e674ac5 100644
--- a/include/linux/radix-tree.h
+++ b/include/linux/radix-tree.h
@@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ static inline int radix_tree_is_indirect_ptr(void *ptr)
 
 /*** radix-tree API starts here ***/
 
-#define RADIX_TREE_MAX_TAGS 2
+#define RADIX_TREE_MAX_TAGS 3
 
 /* root tags are stored in gfp_mask, shifted by __GFP_BITS_SHIFT */
 struct radix_tree_root {