On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 09:11:54AM +0200, Johannes Weiner wrote: > On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 02:56:40PM +0900, Minchan Kim wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 04:42:48PM +0200, Johannes Weiner wrote: > > > The maximum number of dirty pages that exist in the system at any time > > > is determined by a number of pages considered dirtyable and a > > > user-configured percentage of those, or an absolute number in bytes. > > > > It's explanation of old approach. > > What do you mean? This does not change with this patch. We still > have a number of dirtyable pages and a limit that is applied > relatively to this number. > > > > This number of dirtyable pages is the sum of memory provided by all > > > the zones in the system minus their lowmem reserves and high > > > watermarks, so that the system can retain a healthy number of free > > > pages without having to reclaim dirty pages. > > > > It's a explanation of new approach. > > Same here, this aspect is also not changed with this patch! > > > > But there is a flaw in that we have a zoned page allocator which does > > > not care about the global state but rather the state of individual > > > memory zones. And right now there is nothing that prevents one zone > > > from filling up with dirty pages while other zones are spared, which > > > frequently leads to situations where kswapd, in order to restore the > > > watermark of free pages, does indeed have to write pages from that > > > zone's LRU list. This can interfere so badly with IO from the flusher > > > threads that major filesystems (btrfs, xfs, ext4) mostly ignore write > > > requests from reclaim already, taking away the VM's only possibility > > > to keep such a zone balanced, aside from hoping the flushers will soon > > > clean pages from that zone. > > > > It's a explanation of old approach, again! > > Shoudn't we move above phrase of new approach into below? > > Everything above describes the current behaviour (at the point of this > patch, so respecting lowmem_reserve e.g. is part of the current > behaviour by now) and its problems. And below follows a description > of how the patch tries to fix it. It seems that it's not a good choice to use "old" and "new" terms. Hannes, please ignore, it's not a biggie. -- Kind regards, Minchan Kim -- 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>