Re: [PATCH 1/4] mm: vmscan: Correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely

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On 06/24/2011 10:44 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently
causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark.
This is expected behaviour.

A problem occurs if the highest zone is small.  balance_pgdat()
only considers unreclaimable zones when priority is DEF_PRIORITY
but sleeping_prematurely considers all zones. It's possible for this
sequence to occur

   1. kswapd wakes up and enters balance_pgdat()
   2. At DEF_PRIORITY, marks highest zone unreclaimable
   3. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, ignores highest zone setting end_zone
   4. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, calls shrink_slab freeing memory from
         highest zone, clearing all_unreclaimable. Highest zone
         is still unbalanced
   5. kswapd returns and calls sleeping_prematurely
   6. sleeping_prematurely looks at *all* zones, not just the ones
      being considered by balance_pgdat. The highest small zone
      has all_unreclaimable cleared but but the zone is not
      balanced. all_zones_ok is false so kswapd stays awake

This patch corrects the behaviour of sleeping_prematurely to check
the zones balance_pgdat() checked.

Reported-and-tested-by: Pádraig Brady<P@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman<mgorman@xxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>

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