On 08/10/2011 06:47 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
From: Mel Gorman<mel@xxxxxxxxx> When kswapd is failing to keep zones above the min watermark, a process will enter direct reclaim in the same manner kswapd does. If a dirty page is encountered during the scan, this page is written to backing storage using mapping->writepage. This causes two problems. First, it can result in very deep call stacks, particularly if the target storage or filesystem are complex. Some filesystems ignore write requests from direct reclaim as a result. The second is that a single-page flush is inefficient in terms of IO. While there is an expectation that the elevator will merge requests, this does not always happen. Quoting Christoph Hellwig; The elevator has a relatively small window it can operate on, and can never fix up a bad large scale writeback pattern. This patch prevents direct reclaim writing back filesystem pages by checking if current is kswapd. Anonymous pages are still written to swap as there is not the equivalent of a flusher thread for anonymous pages. If the dirty pages cannot be written back, they are placed back on the LRU lists. There is now a direct dependency on dirty page balancing to prevent too many pages in the system being dirtied which would prevent reclaim making forward progress. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman<mgorman@xxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim<minchan.kim@xxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>