linux-ext4 - Re: Excessive stall times on ext4 in 3.9-rc2

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <20130421000522.GA5054@thunk.org>
Date:	Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:05:22 -0400
From:	Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>
To:	Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>
Cc:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>, Jiri Slaby <jslaby@...e.cz>
Subject: Re: Excessive stall times on ext4 in 3.9-rc2

As an update to this thread, we brought up this issue at LSF/MM, and
there is a thought that we should be able to solve this problem by
having lock_buffer() check to see if the buffer is locked due to a
write being queued, to have the priority of the write bumped up in the
write queues to resolve the priority inversion.  I believe Jeff Moyer
was going to look into this, if I remember correctly.

An alternate solution which I've been playing around adds buffer_head
flags so we can indicate that a buffer contains metadata and/or should
have I/O submitted with the REQ_PRIO flag set.

Adding a buffer_head flag for at least BH_Meta is probably a good
thing, since that way the blktrace will be properly annotated.
Whether we should keep the BH_Prio flag or rely on lock_buffer()
automatically raising the priority is, my feeling is that if
lock_buffer() can do the right thing, we should probably do it via
lock_buffer().  I have a feeling this might be decidedly non-trivial,
though, so perhaps we should just doing via BH flags?

	   	      	     	  	- Ted
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html