824 line 548 [ 594.272797] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 629.231330] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 659.224674] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 689.219890] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 724.226655] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 [ 759.198568] redirtied inode 847824 line 548 # line 548 in fs/fs-writeback.c: 543 if (wbc->pages_skipped != pages_skipped) { 544 /* 545 * writeback is not making progress due to locked 546 * buffers. Skip this inode for now. 547 */ 548 redirty_tail(inode); 549 } More debug efforts show that __block_write_full_page() never has the chance to call submit_bh() for that big dirty file: the buffer head is *clean*. So basicly no page io is issued by __block_write_full_page(), hence pages_skipped goes up. Also the comment in generic_sync_sb_inodes(): 544 /* 545 * writeback is not making progress due to locked 546 * buffers. Skip this inode for now. 547 */ and the comment in __block_write_full_page(): 1713 /* 1714 * The page was marked dirty, but the buffers were 1715 * clean. Someone wrote them back by hand with 1716 * ll_rw_block/submit_bh. A rare case. 1717 */ do not quite agree with each other. The page writeback should be skipped for 'locked buffer', but here it is 'clean buffer'! This patch fixes this bug. Though I'm not sure why __block_write_full_page() is called only to do nothing and who actually issued the writeback for us. This is the two possible new behaviors after the patch: 1) pretty nice: wait 30s and write ALL:) 2) not so good: - during the dd: ~16M - after 30s: ~4M - after 5s: ~4M - after 5s: ~176M The next patch will fix case (2). Cc: David Chinner Cc: Ken Chen Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu Signed-off-by: David Chinner Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds rGVg›&x