Re: 2.4.21-pre2 stalls out when running unixbench

Stephen C. Tweedie (sct@redhat.com)
06 Jan 2003 12:10:42 +0000


Hi,

On Sat, 2003-01-04 at 11:11, Andrew Morton wrote:

> This is because of differences in how sync() is handled between 2.4.20's
> ext3 and 2.4.21-pre2's.
>
> 2.4.21-pre2:
>
> sync() will start the commit, and will wait on it. So you know that
> when it returns, everything which was dirty is now tight on disk.
>
> So yes, running a looping sync while someone else is writing stuff
> will take much longer in 2.4.21-pre2, because that kernel actually
> waits on the writeout.

Actually, I'm wondering if we should back that particular bit out. For
a user with a hundred mounted filesystems, syncing each one in order,
sequentially, is going to suck (and we don't currently have a simple way
in 2.4 to detect which syncs are on separate spindles and so can be
parallelised.)

--Stephen

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