linux-kernel - Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty

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Message-Id: <20070928131012.4a03c53e.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date:	Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:10:12 -0700
From:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no>
Cc:	chakriin5@...il.com, linux-pm@...ts.linux-foundation.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, nfs@...ts.sourceforge.net,
	a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl
Subject: Re: A unresponsive file system can hang all I/O in the system on
 linux-2.6.23-rc6 (dirty_thresh problem?)

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:52:28 -0400
Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no> wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 12:26 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:16:11 -0400 Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no> wrote:
> > > Looking back, they were getting caught up in
> > > balance_dirty_pages_ratelimited() and friends. See the attached
> > > example...
> > 
> > that one is nfs-on-loopback, which is a special case, isn't it?
> 
> I'm not sure that the hang that is illustrated here is so special. It is
> an example of a bog-standard ext3 write, that ends up calling the NFS
> client, which is hanging. The fact that it happens to be hanging on the
> nfsd process is more or less irrelevant here: the same thing could
> happen to any other process in the case where we have an NFS server that
> is down.

hm, so ext3 got stuck in nfs via __alloc_pages direct reclaim?

We should be able to fix that by marking the backing device as
write-congested.  That'll have small race windows, but it should be a 99.9%
fix?

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