On Thursday 15 October 2009, Mel Gorman wrote: > After a lot more eyeballing, the best next candidate within mm is the > following patch. Should be tested on it's own and in combination with > the wakeup-kswapd patch sent before. > > From 4e8b5217f51a00caee527e4e8d8e46fe9f82b482 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 > From: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> > Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:17:05 +0100 > Subject: [PATCH] page allocator: Direct reclaim should always obey > watermarks > > ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS should be cleared when trying to allocate from the > free-lists after a direct reclaim. I've tested the two patches together and this seems like a definite improvement. I still get SKB errors on the first test, but the desktop freezes are a lot shorter and the total time needed to load the 3rd gitk goes down from ~2:15 to ~1:15. The counter in gitk of the number of loaded commits goes up visibly faster and with fewer halts. This is on top of current mainline with the RX_LOW_WATERMARK in iwlagn at it's current value (8). Here are the allocation failures for 2 consecutive tests. Note that the first test still shows quite a lot of failures, but the second test hardly had any at all (I still had music skips though). [ 232.845116] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 232.845116] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 232.873009] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 232.884545] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 240.121577] __ratelimit: 26 callbacks suppressed [ 240.121634] __ratelimit: 6 callbacks suppressed [ 240.124006] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 6 free buffers remaining. [ 304.335767] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 304.335767] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 304.374729] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 309.446481] __ratelimit: 5 callbacks suppressed [ 309.450197] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 0 free buffers remaining. [ 525.912934] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 5 free buffers remaining. [ 525.953939] iwlagn 0000:10:00.0: Failed to allocate SKB buffer with GFP_ATOMIC. Only 7 free buffers remaining. [ 536.058171] __ratelimit: 1 callbacks suppressed Thanks, FJP -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-testers" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
