writeback: permit through good bdi even when global dirty exceeded
On a system with 1 local mount and 1 NFS mount, if the NFS server
becomes not responding when dd to the NFS mount, the NFS dirty pages may
exceed the global dirty limit and _every_ task involving writing will be
blocked. The whole system appears unresponsive.
The workaround is to permit through the bdi's that only has a small
number of dirty pages. The number chosen (bdi_stat_error pages) is not
enough to enable the local disk to run in optimal throughput, however is
enough to make the system responsive on a broken NFS mount. The user can
then kill the dirtiers on the NFS mount and increase the global dirty
limit to bring up the local disk's throughput.
It risks allowing dirty pages to grow much larger than the global dirty
limit when there are 1000+ mounts, however that's very unlikely to happen,
especially in low memory profiles.
projects / kernel.git / commit