linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] writeback: Account the number of pages written back

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Message-ID: <ZKRe2F9BVioSk8YW@casper.infradead.org>
Date:   Tue, 4 Jul 2023 19:03:04 +0100
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
To:     Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@....de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] writeback: Account the number of pages written back

On Tue, Jul 04, 2023 at 07:37:17AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 03, 2023 at 03:13:15AM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 02, 2023 at 01:06:15PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > On Wed, 28 Jun 2023 19:55:48 +0100 "Matthew Wilcox (Oracle)" <willy@...radead.org> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > nr_to_write is a count of pages, so we need to decrease it by the number
> > > > of pages in the folio we just wrote, not by 1.  Most callers specify
> > > > either LONG_MAX or 1, so are unaffected, but writeback_sb_inodes()
> > > > might end up writing 512x as many pages as it asked for.
> > > 
> > > 512 is a big number,  Should we backport this?
> > 
> > I'm really not sure.  Maybe?  I'm hoping one of the bots comes up with a
> > meaningful performance change as a result of this patch and we find out.
> 
> XFS is the only filesystem this would affect, right? AFAIA, nothing
> else enables large folios and uses writeback through
> write_cache_pages() at this point...

Good point.  Still, Intel's 0day has squawked about a loss of performance
when large folios have _stopped_ being used, so they are at least testing
with XFS.