writeback: simplify bdi code a little

This patch simplifies bdi code a little by removing the 'pending_list' which is
redundant. Indeed, currently the forker thread ('bdi_forker_thread()') is
working like this:

1. In a loop, fetch all bdi's which have works but have no writeback thread and
   move them to the 'pending_list'.
2. If the list is empty, sleep for 5 sec.
3. Otherwise, take one bdi from the list, fork the writeback thread for this
   bdi, and repeat the loop.

IOW, it first moves everything to the 'pending_list', then process only one
element, and so on. This patch simplifies the algorithm, which is now as
follows.

1. Find the first bdi which has a work and remove it from the global list of
   bdi's (bdi_list).
2. If there was not such bdi, sleep 5 sec.
3. Fork the writeback thread for this bdi and repeat the loop.

IOW, now we find the first bdi to process, process it, and so on. This is
simpler and involves less lists.

The bonus now is that we can get rid of a couple of functions, as well as
remove complications which involve 'rcu_call()' and 'bdi->rcu_head'.

This patch also makes sure we use 'list_add_tail_rcu()', instead of plain
'list_add_tail()', but this piece of code is going to be removed in the next
patch anyway.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/backing-dev.h b/include/linux/backing-dev.h
index f0936f5f85d..95ecb2bebca 100644
--- a/include/linux/backing-dev.h
+++ b/include/linux/backing-dev.h
@@ -58,7 +58,6 @@ struct bdi_writeback {
 
 struct backing_dev_info {
 	struct list_head bdi_list;
-	struct rcu_head rcu_head;
 	unsigned long ra_pages;	/* max readahead in PAGE_CACHE_SIZE units */
 	unsigned long state;	/* Always use atomic bitops on this */
 	unsigned int capabilities; /* Device capabilities */