Re: [GIT PULL] writeback: convert writeback to unbound workqueue

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Tue Apr 02 2013 - 05:54:07 EST


On Mon, Apr 01 2013, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Jens.
>
> This is the pull request for the earlier patchset[1] with the same
> name. It's only three patches (the first one was committed to
> workqueue tree) but the merge strategy is a bit involved due to the
> dependencies.
>
> * Because the conversion needs features from wq/for-3.10,
> block/for-3.10/core is based on rc3, and wq/for-3.10 has conflicts
> with rc3, I pulled mainline (rc5) into wq/for-3.10 to prevent those
> workqueue conflicts from flaring up in block tree.
>
> * Resolving the issue that Jan and Dave raised about debugging
> requires arch-wide changes. The patchset is being worked on[2] but
> it'll have to go through -mm after these changes show up in -next,
> and not included in this pull request.
>
> The three commits are located in the following git branch.
>
> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/wq.git writeback-workqueue
>
> Pulling it into block/for-3.10/core produces a conflict in
> drivers/md/raid5.c between the following two commits.
>
> e3620a3ad5 ("MD RAID5: Avoid accessing gendisk or queue structs when not available")
> 2f6db2a707 ("raid5: use bio_reset()")
>
> The conflict is trivial - one removes an "if ()" conditional while the
> other removes "rbi->bi_next = NULL" right above it. We just need to
> remove both. The merged branch is available at
>
> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/wq.git block-test-merge
>
> so that you can use it for verification. The test merge commit has
> proper merge description.
>
> While these changes are a bit of pain to route, they make code simpler
> and even have, while minute, measureable performance gain[3] even on a
> workload which isn't particularly favorable to showing the benefits of
> this conversion.

Thanks, pulled in for testing. We'll need the debug change in before
sending this upstream, though. I agree with Jan/Dave that this is
required functionality, for debugging purposes.

--
Jens Axboe

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