xfs: xfs_sync_data is redundant.

We don't do any data writeback from XFS any more - the VFS is
completely responsible for that, including for freeze. We can
replace the remaining caller with a VFS level function that
achieves the same thing, but without conflicting with current
writeback work.

This means we can remove the flush_work and xfs_flush_inodes() - the
VFS functionality completely replaces the internal flush queue for
doing this writeback work in a separate context to avoid stack
overruns.

This does have one complication - it cannot be called with page
locks held.  Hence move the flushing of delalloc space when ENOSPC
occurs back up into xfs_file_aio_buffered_write when we don't hold
any locks that will stall writeback.

Unfortunately, writeback_inodes_sb_if_idle() is not sufficient to
trigger delalloc conversion fast enough to prevent spurious ENOSPC
whent here are hundreds of writers, thousands of small files and GBs
of free RAM.  Hence we need to use sync_sb_inodes() to block callers
while we wait for writeback like the previous xfs_flush_inodes
implementation did.

That means we have to hold the s_umount lock here, but because this
call can nest inside i_mutex (the parent directory in the create
case, held by the VFS), we have to use down_read_trylock() to avoid
potential deadlocks. In practice, this trylock will succeed on
almost every attempt as unmount/remount type operations are
exceedingly rare.

Note: we always need to pass a count of zero to
generic_file_buffered_write() as the previously written byte count.
We only do this by accident before this patch by the virtue of ret
always being zero when there are no errors. Make this explicit
rather than needing to specifically zero ret in the ENOSPC retry
case.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_file.c b/fs/xfs/xfs_file.c
index aa473fa640a..daf4066c24b 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_file.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_file.c
@@ -728,16 +728,17 @@ xfs_file_buffered_aio_write(
 write_retry:
 	trace_xfs_file_buffered_write(ip, count, iocb->ki_pos, 0);
 	ret = generic_file_buffered_write(iocb, iovp, nr_segs,
-			pos, &iocb->ki_pos, count, ret);
+			pos, &iocb->ki_pos, count, 0);
+
 	/*
-	 * if we just got an ENOSPC, flush the inode now we aren't holding any
-	 * page locks and retry *once*
+	 * If we just got an ENOSPC, try to write back all dirty inodes to
+	 * convert delalloc space to free up some of the excess reserved
+	 * metadata space.
 	 */
 	if (ret == -ENOSPC && !enospc) {
 		enospc = 1;
-		ret = -xfs_flush_pages(ip, 0, -1, 0, FI_NONE);
-		if (!ret)
-			goto write_retry;
+		xfs_flush_inodes(ip->i_mount);
+		goto write_retry;
 	}
 
 	current->backing_dev_info = NULL;