Merge patch series "writeback: Avoid lockups when switching inodes"

Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz> says:

This patch series addresses lockups reported by users when systemd unit reading
lots of files from a filesystem mounted with lazytime mount option exits. See
patch 3 for more details about the reproducer.

There are two main issues why switching many inodes between wbs:

1) Multiple workers will be spawned to do the switching but they all contend
on the same wb->list_lock making all the parallelism pointless and just
wasting time.

2) Sorting of wb->b_dirty list by dirtied_time_when is inherently slow.

Patches 1-3 address these problems, patch 4 adds a tracepoint for better
observability of inode writeback switching.

* patches from https://lore.kernel.org/20250912103522.2935-1-jack@suse.cz:
  writeback: Add tracepoint to track pending inode switches
  writeback: Avoid excessively long inode switching times
  writeback: Avoid softlockup when switching many inodes
  writeback: Avoid contention on wb->list_lock when switching inodes

Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/backing-dev-defs.h b/include/linux/backing-dev-defs.h
index 2ad261082bba..c5c9d89c73ed 100644
--- a/include/linux/backing-dev-defs.h
+++ b/include/linux/backing-dev-defs.h
@@ -152,6 +152,10 @@ struct bdi_writeback {
 	struct list_head blkcg_node;	/* anchored at blkcg->cgwb_list */
 	struct list_head b_attached;	/* attached inodes, protected by list_lock */
 	struct list_head offline_node;	/* anchored at offline_cgwbs */
+	struct work_struct switch_work;	/* work used to perform inode switching
+					 * to this wb */
+	struct llist_head switch_wbs_ctxs;	/* queued contexts for
+						 * writeback switching */
 
 	union {
 		struct work_struct release_work;