From: Andrew Morton There's a comment in there which claims that the inode is left on s_io if nfs chickened out of writing some data. But that's not been true for three years. 9290280ced13c85689adeffa587e9a53bd3a5873 fixed a livelock by moving these inodes back onto s_dirty. Fix the comment. In the second leg of the `if', use redirty_tail() rather than open-coding it. Add weaselly comment indicating lack of confidence in the code and lack of the fortitude which would be needed to fiddle with it. Cc: Mike Waychison Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- fs/fs-writeback.c | 15 +++++++++++---- 1 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff -puN fs/fs-writeback.c~writeback-fix-comment-use-helper-function fs/fs-writeback.c --- a/fs/fs-writeback.c~writeback-fix-comment-use-helper-function +++ a/fs/fs-writeback.c @@ -200,7 +200,6 @@ __sync_single_inode(struct inode *inode, { unsigned dirty; struct address_space *mapping = inode->i_mapping; - struct super_block *sb = inode->i_sb; int wait = wbc->sync_mode == WB_SYNC_ALL; int ret; @@ -236,7 +235,16 @@ __sync_single_inode(struct inode *inode, /* * We didn't write back all the pages. nfs_writepages() * sometimes bales out without doing anything. Redirty - * the inode. It is still on sb->s_io. + * the inode. It is moved from s_io onto s_dirty. + */ + /* + * akpm: if the caller was the kupdate function we put + * this inode at the head of s_dirty so it gets first + * consideration. Otherwise, move it to the tail, for + * the reasons described there. I'm not really sure + * how much sense this makes. Presumably I had a good + * reasons for doing it this way, and I'd rather not + * muck with it at present. */ if (wbc->for_kupdate) { /* @@ -256,8 +264,7 @@ __sync_single_inode(struct inode *inode, * all the other files. */ inode->i_state |= I_DIRTY_PAGES; - inode->dirtied_when = jiffies; - list_move(&inode->i_list, &sb->s_dirty); + redirty_tail(inode); } } else if (inode->i_state & I_DIRTY) { /* _