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    mm: swap: mark swap pages writeback before queueing for direct IO · 0cdc444a
    Mel Gorman authored
    
    
    As pointed out by Andrew Morton, the swap-over-NFS writeback is not
    setting PageWriteback before it is queued for direct IO.  While swap
    pages do not participate in BDI or process dirty accounting and the IO
    is synchronous, the writeback bit is still required and not setting it
    in this case was an oversight.  swapoff depends on the page writeback to
    synchronoise all pending writes on a swap page before it is reused.
    Swapcache freeing and reuse depend on checking the PageWriteback under
    lock to ensure the page is safe to reuse.
    
    Direct IO handlers and the direct IO handler for NFS do not deal with
    PageWriteback as they are synchronous writes.  In the case of NFS, it
    schedules pages (or a page in the case of swap) for IO and then waits
    synchronously for IO to complete in nfs_direct_write().  It is
    recognised that this is a slowdown from normal swap handling which is
    asynchronous and uses a completion handler.  Shoving PageWriteback
    handling down into direct IO handlers looks like a bad fit to handle the
    swap case although it may have to be dealt with some day if swap is
    converted to use direct IO in general and bmap is finally done away
    with.  At that point it will be necessary to refit asynchronous direct
    IO with completion handlers onto the swap subsystem.
    
    As swapcache currently depends on PageWriteback to protect against
    races, this patch sets PageWriteback under the page lock before queueing
    it for direct IO.  It is cleared when the direct IO handler returns.  IO
    errors are treated similarly to the direct-to-bio case except PageError
    is not set as in the case of swap-over-NFS, it is likely to be a
    transient error.
    
    It was asked what prevents such a page being reclaimed in parallel.
    With this patch applied, such a page will now be skipped (most of the
    time) or blocked until the writeback completes.  Reclaim checks
    PageWriteback under the page lock before calling try_to_free_swap and
    the page lock should prevent the page being requeued for IO before it is
    freed.
    
    This and Jerome's related patch should considered for -stable as far
    back as 3.6 when swap-over-NFS was introduced.
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: use pr_err_ratelimited()]
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: remove hopefully-unneeded cast in printk]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
    Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
    Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>	[3.6+]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    0cdc444a