other devices when one device is attacked by some "massive parallel" workload, or suffers from slow write bandwidth, or somehow get stalled due to some error condition (eg. NFS server not responding). For a stalled device, we need to completely block its dirtiers, too, before its bdi dirty pages grow all the way up to the global limit and leave no space for the other functional devices. So change the loop exit condition to /* * Always enforce global dirty limit; also enforce bdi dirty limit * if the normal max_pause sleeps cannot keep things under control. */ if (nr_dirty < dirty_thresh && (bdi_dirty < bdi_thresh || bdi->dirty_ratelimit > 1)) break; which can be further simplified to if (task_ratelimit) break; Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang ”G"”@x