sync: don't block the flusher thread waiting on IO [Dave Chinner]

When sync does it's WB_SYNC_ALL writeback, it issues data Io and then immediately waits for IO completion. This is done in the context of the flusher thread, and hence completely ties up the flusher thread for the backing device include/linux/writeback.huntil all the dirty inodes have been synced. On filesystems that are dirtying inodes constantly and quickly, this means the flusher thread can be tied up for minutes per sync call and hence badly affect system level write IO performance as the page cache cannot be cleaned quickly.

We already have a wait loop for IO completion for sync(2), so cut this out of the flusher thread and delegate it to wait_sb_inodes(). Hence we can do rapid IO submission, and then wait for it all to complete.

Effect of sync on fsmark before the patch:

FSUse%        Count         Size    Files/sec     App Overhead
.....
     0       640000         4096      35154.6          1026984
     0       720000         4096      36740.3          1023844
     0       800000         4096      36184.6           916599
     0       880000         4096       1282.7          1054367
     0       960000         4096       3951.3           918773
     0      1040000         4096      40646.2           996448
     0      1120000         4096      43610.1           895647
     0      1200000         4096      40333.1           921048
include/linux/writeback.h
And a single sync pass took:

  real    0m52.407s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.090s

After the patch, there is no impact on fsmark results, and each individual sync(2) operation run concurrently with the same fsmark workload takes roughly 7s:

  real    0m6.930s
  user    0m0.000s
  sys     0m0.039s

IOWs, sync is 7-8x faster on a busy filesystem and does not have an adverse impact on ongoing async data write operations.

Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Francisco Franco <franciscofranco.1990@gmail.com>