NFS: Fix a race when doing NFS write coalescing

Currently we do write coalescing in a very inefficient manner: one pass in
generic_writepages() in order to lock the pages for writing, then one pass
in nfs_flush_mapping() and/or nfs_sync_mapping_wait() in order to gather
the locked pages for coalescing into RPC requests of size "wsize".

In fact, it turns out there is actually a deadlock possible here since we
only start I/O on the second pass. If the user signals the process while
we're in nfs_sync_mapping_wait(), for instance, then we may exit before
starting I/O on all the requests that have been queued up.

Signed-off-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/writeback.h b/include/linux/writeback.h
index 0c78f7f4a976..daa6c125f66e 100644
--- a/include/linux/writeback.h
+++ b/include/linux/writeback.h
@@ -59,6 +59,8 @@ struct writeback_control {
         unsigned for_reclaim:1;         /* Invoked from the page allocator */
         unsigned for_writepages:1;      /* This is a writepages() call */
         unsigned range_cyclic:1;        /* range_start is cyclic */
+
+        void *fs_private;               /* For use by ->writepages() */
 };
 
 /*