On Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:41:22 +0000 Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Short summary: There are severe stalls when a USB stick using VFAT > is used with THP enabled that are reduced by this series. If you are > experiencing this problem, please test and report back and considering > I have seen complaints from openSUSE and Fedora users on this as well > as a few private mails, I'm guessing it's a widespread issue. This > is a new type of USB-related stall because it is due to synchronous > compaction writing where as in the past the big problem was dirty > pages reaching the end of the LRU and being written by reclaim. > > Am cc'ing Andrew this time and this series would replace > mm-do-not-stall-in-synchronous-compaction-for-thp-allocations.patch. > I'm also cc'ing Dave Jones as he might have merged that patch to Fedora > for wider testing and ideally it would be reverted and replaced by > this series. So it appears that the problem is painful for distros and users and that we won't have this fixed until 3.2 at best, and that fix will be a difficult backport for distributors of earlier kernels. To serve those people better, I'm wondering if we should merge mm-do-not-stall-in-synchronous-compaction-for-thp-allocations now, make it available for -stable backport and then revert it as part of this series? ie: give people a stopgap while we fix it properly? -- 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>