You may well be right.
My initial reaction was to point out that my patch was to a
2.6.23-rc6-mm1 implementation detail, whereas this thread is
about a problem seen since 2.6.20 or perhaps earlier.
But once I look harder at it, I wonder what would have kept
2.6.18 to 2.6.23 safe from the same issue: per-cpu deltas from
the global vm stats too low to get synched back to global, yet
adding up to something which misleads balance_dirty_pages into
an indefinite loop e.g. total nr_writeback actually 0, but
appearing more than dirty_thresh in the global approximation.
Certainly my rc6-mm1 patch won't work here, and all it was doing
was apply some safety already added by Peter to one further case.
Looking at the 2.6.18-2.6.23 code, I'm uncertain what to try instead.
There is a refresh_vm_stats function which we could call (then retest
the break condition) just before resorting to congestion_wait. But
the big NUMA people might get very upset with me calling that too
often: causing a thundering herd of bouncing cachelines which that
was all designed to avoid. And it's not obvious to me what condition
to test for dirty_thresh "too low".
I believe Peter gave all this quite a lot of thought when he was
making the rc6-mm1 changes, and I'd rather defer to him for a
suggestion of what best to do in earlier releases. Or maybe he'll
just point out how this couldn't have been a problem before.
Or there is is Richard's patch, which I haven't considered, but
Andrew was not quite satisfied with it - partly because he'd like
to understand how the situation could come about first, perhaps
we have now got an explanation.
(The original bug report was indeed on SMP, but I haven't seen
anyone say that's a necessary condition for the hang: it would
be if this is the issue. And Richard writes at one point of the
system only responding to AltSysRq: that would be surprising for
this issue, though it's possible that a task in balance_dirty_pages
is holding an i_mutex that everybody else comes to need.)
Hugh
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