here. What we do is to move the skipped inode to the _head_ of s_dirty, immediately eligible for writeout again. Instead of deferring that writeout for another 30 seconds. One would think that this might cause a livelock: we keep on trying to write the same locked inode. But it won't because: a) if that was the case, it would _already_ be happening on the balance_dirty_pages codepath. Because balance_dirty_pages() doesn't care about inode timestamps. b) if we skipped this inode then we won't have done any writeback. The higher-level writeback paths will see that wbc.nr_to_write didn't change and they'll then back off and take a nap. Cc: Mike Waychison Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds