Re: [PATCH] Freeze bdevs when freezing processes.

On Friday, 27 October 2006 03:38, David Chinner wrote:
On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 11:11:29AM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
On Thursday, 26 October 2006 10:57, David Chinner wrote:
On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 06:18:29PM +1000, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
As you have them at the moment, the threads seem to be freezing fine.
The issue I've seen in the past related not to threads but to timer
based activity. Admittedly it was 2.6.14 when I last looked at it, but
there used to be a possibility for XFS to submit I/O from a timer when
the threads are frozen but the bdev isn't frozen. Has that changed?

I didn't think we've ever done that - periodic or delayed operations
are passed off to the kernel threads to execute. A stack trace
(if you still have it) would be really help here.

Hmmm - we have a couple of per-cpu work queues as well that are
used on I/O completion and that can, in some circumstances,
trigger new transactions. If we are only flush metadata, then
I don't think that any more I/o will be issued, but I could be
wrong (maze of twisty passages).

Well, I think this exactly is the problem, because worker_threads run with
PF_NOFREEZE set (as I've just said in another message).

Ok, so freezing the filesystem is the only way you can prevent
this as the workqueues are flushed as part of quiescing the filesystem.

Yes, I think so.

Now at last I know what the problem actually is and why we need the freezing
of filesystems, so thanks for helping me understand that. :-)

Greetings,
Rafael


--
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
R. Buckminster Fuller
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