linux-wandboard

drbd: add back some fairness to AL transactions

When batching more updates to the activity log into single transactions,
we lost the ability for new requests to force themselves into the active
set: all preparation steps became non-blocking, and if all currently
hot extents keep busy, they could starve out new incoming requests
to cold extents for quite a while.

This can only happen if your IO backend accepts more IO operations per
average DRBD replication round trip time than you have al-extents
configured.

If we have incoming requests to cold extents,
at least do one blocking update per transaction.

In an artificial worst-case workload on SSD with an asynchronous 600 ms
replication link, with al-extents = 7 (the minimum we allow), and
concurrent full resynch, without this patch, some write requests have
been observed to be starved for 40 seconds.
With this patch, application observed a worst case latency of twice the
replication round trip time.

Signed-off-by: Philipp Reisner <philipp.reisner@linbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Lars Ellenberg <lars.ellenberg@linbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>