writeback: optimize periodic bdi thread wakeups

Whe the first inode for a bdi is marked dirty, we wake up the bdi thread which
should take care of the periodic background write-out. However, the write-out
will actually start only 'dirty_writeback_interval' centisecs later, so we can
delay the wake-up.

This change was requested by Nick Piggin who pointed out that if we delay the
wake-up, we weed out 2 unnecessary contex switches, which matters because
'__mark_inode_dirty()' is a hot-path function.

This patch introduces a new function - 'bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed()', which
sets up a timer to wake-up the bdi thread and returns. So the wake-up is
delayed.

We also delete the timer in bdi threads just before writing-back. And
synchronously delete it when unregistering bdi. At the unregister point the bdi
does not have any users, so no one can arm it again.

Since now we take 'bdi->wb_lock' in the timer, which can execute in softirq
context, we have to use 'spin_lock_bh()' for 'bdi->wb_lock'. This patch makes
this change as well.

This patch also moves the 'bdi_wb_init()' function down in the file to avoid
forward-declaration of 'bdi_wakeup_thread_delayed()'.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions