On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 15:57 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Subject: mm: speed up writeback ramp-up on clean systems
> > >
> > > We allow violation of bdi limits if there is a lot of room on the
> > > system. Once we hit half the total limit we start enforcing bdi limits
> > > and bdi ramp-up should happen. Doing it this way avoids many small
> > > writeouts on an otherwise idle system and should also speed up the
> > > ramp-up.
>
> Given the problems we're having in there I'm a bit reluctant to go tossing
> hastily put together and inadequately tested stuff onto the fire. And
> that's what this patch looks like to me.
Not really hastily, I think it was written before the stuff hit
mainline. Inadequately tested, perhaps, its been in my and probably Wu's
kernels for a while. Granted that's not a lot of testing in the face of
those who have problems atm.
> Wanna convince me otherwise?
I'm perfectly happy with this patch earning its credits in -mm for a
while and maybe going in around -rc4 or something like that (hoping that
by then we've fixed these nagging issues).
Another patch I did come up with yesterday - not driven by any problems
in that area - could perhaps join this one on that path:
---
Subject: mm: bdi: tweak task dirty penalty
Penalizing heavy dirtiers with 1/8-th the total dirty limit might be rather
excessive on large memory machines. Use sqrt to scale it sub-linearly.
Update the comment while we're there.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/page-writeback.c | 12 ++++++++----
1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
Index: linux-2.6-2/mm/page-writeback.c
===================================================================
--- linux-2.6-2.orig/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ linux-2.6-2/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -213,17 +213,21 @@ static inline void task_dirties_fraction
}
/*
- * scale the dirty limit
+ * Task specific dirty limit:
*
- * task specific dirty limit:
+ * dirty -= 8 * sqrt(dirty) * p_{t}
*
- * dirty -= (dirty/8) * p_{t}
+ * Penalize tasks that dirty a lot of pages by lowering their dirty limit. This
+ * avoids infrequent dirtiers from getting stuck in this other guys dirty
+ * pages.
+ *
+ * Use a sub-linear function to scale the penalty, we only need a little room.
*/
void task_dirty_limit(struct task_struct *tsk, long *pdirty)
{
long numerator, denominator;
long dirty = *pdirty;
- u64 inv = dirty >> 3;
+ u64 inv = 8*int_sqrt(dirty);
task_dirties_fraction(tsk, &numerator, &denominator);
inv *= numerator;
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
