xfs: Use delayed write for inodes rather than async V2

We currently do background inode flush asynchronously, resulting in
inodes being written in whatever order the background writeback
issues them. Not only that, there are also blocking and non-blocking
asynchronous inode flushes, depending on where the flush comes from.

This patch completely removes asynchronous inode writeback. It
removes all the strange writeback modes and replaces them with
either a synchronous flush or a non-blocking delayed write flush.
That is, inode flushes will only issue IO directly if they are
synchronous, and background flushing may do nothing if the operation
would block (e.g. on a pinned inode or buffer lock).

Delayed write flushes will now result in the inode buffer sitting in
the delwri queue of the buffer cache to be flushed by either an AIL
push or by the xfsbufd timing out the buffer. This will allow
accumulation of dirty inode buffers in memory and allow optimisation
of inode cluster writeback at the xfsbufd level where we have much
greater queue depths than the block layer elevators. We will also
get adjacent inode cluster buffer IO merging for free when a later
patch in the series allows sorting of the delayed write buffers
before dispatch.

This effectively means that any inode that is written back by
background writeback will be seen as flush locked during AIL
pushing, and will result in the buffers being pushed from there.
This writeback path is currently non-optimal, but the next patch
in the series will fix that problem.

A side effect of this delayed write mechanism is that background
inode reclaim will no longer directly flush inodes, nor can it wait
on the flush lock. The result is that inode reclaim must leave the
inode in the reclaimable state until it is clean. Hence attempts to
reclaim a dirty inode in the background will simply skip the inode
until it is clean and this allows other mechanisms (i.e. xfsbufd) to
do more optimal writeback of the dirty buffers. As a result, the
inode reclaim code has been rewritten so that it no longer relies on
the ambiguous return values of xfs_iflush() to determine whether it
is safe to reclaim an inode.

Portions of this patch are derived from patches by Christoph
Hellwig.

Version 2:
- cleanup reclaim code as suggested by Christoph
- log background reclaim inode flush errors
- just pass sync flags to xfs_iflush

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
index 48ec1c0b23ce..207553e82954 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_inode_item.c
@@ -866,10 +866,14 @@ xfs_inode_item_push(
                iip->ili_format.ilf_fields != 0);
 
         /*
-         * Write out the inode.  The completion routine ('iflush_done') will
-         * pull it from the AIL, mark it clean, unlock the flush lock.
+         * Push the inode to it's backing buffer. This will not remove the
+         * inode from the AIL - a further push will be required to trigger a
+         * buffer push. However, this allows all the dirty inodes to be pushed
+         * to the buffer before it is pushed to disk. THe buffer IO completion
+         * will pull th einode from the AIL, mark it clean and unlock the flush
+         * lock.
          */
-        (void) xfs_iflush(ip, XFS_IFLUSH_ASYNC);
+        (void) xfs_iflush(ip, 0);
         xfs_iunlock(ip, XFS_ILOCK_SHARED);
 
         return;