> On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 01:15 +0800, Mel Gorman wrote: > > When the allocator enters its slow path, kswapd is woken up to balance the > > node. It continues working until all zones within the node are balanced. For > > order-0 allocations, this makes perfect sense but for higher orders it can > > have unintended side-effects. If the zone sizes are imbalanced, kswapd > > may reclaim heavily on a smaller zone discarding an excessive number of > > pages. The user-visible behaviour is that kswapd is awake and reclaiming > > even though plenty of pages are free from a suitable zone. > > > > This patch alters the "balance" logic to stop kswapd if any suitable zone > > becomes balanced to reduce the number of pages it reclaims from other zones. > from my understanding, the patch will break reclaim high zone if a low > zone meets the high order allocation, even the high zone doesn't meet > the high order allocation. This, for example, will make a high order > allocation from a high zone fallback to low zone and quickly exhaust low > zone, for example DMA. This will break some drivers. Have you seen patch [3/3]? I think it migigate your pointed issue. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom policy in Canada: sign http://dissolvethecrtc.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>