On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 01:04:40 +0100 Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 02:19:09PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > > On Wed, 8 Dec 2010 16:16:59 +0100 > > Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > Kswapd tries to rebalance zones persistently until their high > > > watermarks are restored. > > > > > > If the amount of unreclaimable pages in a zone makes this impossible > > > for reclaim, though, kswapd will end up in a busy loop without a > > > chance of reaching its goal. > > > > > > This behaviour was observed on a virtual machine with a tiny > > > Normal-zone that filled up with unreclaimable slab objects. > > > > Doesn't this mean that vmscan is incorrectly handling its > > zone->all_unreclaimable logic? > > I don't think so. What leads to the problem is that we only declare a > zone unreclaimable after a lot of work, but reset it with a single > page that gets released back to the allocator (past the pcp queue, > that is). > > That's probably a good idea per-se, we don't want to leave a zone > behind and retry it eagerly when pages are freed up. > > > presumably in certain cases that's a bit more efficient than doing the > > scan and using ->all_unreclaimable. But the scanner shouldn't have got > > stuck! That's a regresion which got added, and I don't think that new > > code of this nature was needed to fix that regression. > > I'll dig through the history. But we observed this on a very odd > configuration (24MB ZONE_NORMAL), maybe this was never hit before? > > > Did this zone end up with ->all_unreclaimable set? If so, why was > > kswapd stuck in a loop scanning an all-unreclaimable zone? > > It wasn't. This state is just not very sticky. After all, the zone > is not all_unreclaimable, just not reclaimable enough to restore the > high watermark. But the remaining reclaimable pages of that zone may > very well be in constant flux. It's bothersome that we have two mechanisms for doing pretty mcuh the same thing. > > Also, if I'm understanding the new logic then if the "goal" is 100 > > pages and zone_reclaimable_pages() says "50 pages potentially > > reclaimable" then kswapd won't reclaim *any* pages. If so, is that > > good behaviour? Should we instead attempt to reclaim some of those 50 > > pages and then give up? That sounds like a better strategy if we want > > to keep (say) network Rx happening in a tight memory situation. > > Yes, that is probably a good idea. I'll see that this is improved for > atomic allocators. Does that mean we can expect a v2? -- 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>