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. Unfortunately, if the highest zone is small, a problem occurs. When balance_pgdat() returns, it may be at a lower classzone_idx than it started because the highest zone was unreclaimable. Before checking if it should go to sleep though, it checks pgdat->classzone_idx which when there is no other activity will be MAX_NR_ZONES-1. It interprets this as it has been woken up while reclaiming, skips scheduling and reclaims again. As there is no useful reclaim work to do, it enters into a loop of shrinking slab consuming loads of CPU until the highest zone becomes reclaimable for a long period of time. There are two problems here. 1) If the returned classzone or order is lower, it'll continue reclaiming without scheduling. 2) if the highest zone was marked unreclaimable but balance_pgdat() returns immediately at DEF_PRIORITY, the new lower classzone is not communicated back to kswapd() for sleeping. This patch does two things that are related. If the end_zone is unreclaimable, this information is communicated back. Second, if the classzone or order was reduced due to failing to reclaim, new information is not read from pgdat and instead an attempt is made to go to sleep. Due to this, it is also necessary that pgdat->classzone_idx be initialised each time to pgdat->nr_zones - 1 to avoid re-reads being interpreted as wakeups. Reported-and-tested-by: Pádraig Brady<P@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman<mgorman@xxxxxxx>
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