On Mon 13-03-23 13:25:07, Marcelo Tosatti wrote: > This patch series addresses the following two problems: > > 1. A customer provided some evidence which indicates that > the idle tick was stopped; albeit, CPU-specific vmstat > counters still remained populated. > > Thus one can only assume quiet_vmstat() was not > invoked on return to the idle loop. If I understand > correctly, I suspect this divergence might erroneously > prevent a reclaim attempt by kswapd. If the number of > zone specific free pages are below their per-cpu drift > value then zone_page_state_snapshot() is used to > compute a more accurate view of the aforementioned > statistic. Thus any task blocked on the NUMA node > specific pfmemalloc_wait queue will be unable to make > significant progress via direct reclaim unless it is > killed after being woken up by kswapd > (see throttle_direct_reclaim()) I have hard time to follow the actual problem described above. Are you suggesting that a lack of pcp vmstat counters update has led to reclaim issues? What is the said "evidence"? Could you share more of the story please? > 2. With a SCHED_FIFO task that busy loops on a given CPU, > and kworker for that CPU at SCHED_OTHER priority, > queuing work to sync per-vmstats will either cause that > work to never execute, or stalld (i.e. stall daemon) > boosts kworker priority which causes a latency > violation Why is that a problem? Out-of-sync stats shouldn't cause major problems. Or can they? Thanks! -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs
