NFS: Throttle page dirtying while we're flushing to disk

The following patch is a combination of a patch by myself and Peter
Staubach.

Trond: If we allow other processes to dirty pages while a process is doing
a consistency sync to disk, we can end up never making progress.

Peter: Attached is a patch which addresses a continuing problem with
the NFS client generating out of order WRITE requests.  While
this is compliant with all of the current protocol
specifications, there are servers in the market which can not
handle out of order WRITE requests very well.  Also, this may
lead to sub-optimal block allocations in the underlying file
system on the server.  This may cause the read throughputs to
be reduced when reading the file from the server.

Peter: There has been a lot of work recently done to address out of
order issues on a systemic level.  However, the NFS client is
still susceptible to the problem.  Out of order WRITE
requests can occur when pdflush is in the middle of writing
out pages while the process dirtying the pages calls
generic_file_buffered_write which calls
generic_perform_write which calls
balance_dirty_pages_rate_limited which ends up calling
writeback_inodes which ends up calling back into the NFS
client to writes out dirty pages for the same file that
pdflush happens to be working with.

Signed-off-by: Peter Staubach <staubach@redhat.com>
[modification by Trond to merge the two similar patches]
Signed-off-by: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/nfs/file.c b/fs/nfs/file.c
index 90f292b520d2..404c19c866a7 100644
--- a/fs/nfs/file.c
+++ b/fs/nfs/file.c
@@ -354,6 +354,15 @@ static int nfs_write_begin(struct file *file, struct address_space *mapping,
 		file->f_path.dentry->d_name.name,
 		mapping->host->i_ino, len, (long long) pos);
 
+	/*
+	 * Prevent starvation issues if someone is doing a consistency
+	 * sync-to-disk
+	 */
+	ret = wait_on_bit(&NFS_I(mapping->host)->flags, NFS_INO_FLUSHING,
+			nfs_wait_bit_killable, TASK_KILLABLE);
+	if (ret)
+		return ret;
+
 	page = grab_cache_page_write_begin(mapping, index, flags);
 	if (!page)
 		return -ENOMEM;