On Wed, 7 Nov 2012 11:11:24 +0800 Ming Lei <ming.lei@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 7:23 AM, Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > It's unclear from the description why we're also clearing __GFP_FS in
> > this situation.
> >
> > If we can avoid doing this then there will be a very small gain: there
> > are some situations in which a filesystem can clean pagecache without
> > performing I/O.
>
> Firstly, the patch follows the policy in the system suspend/resume situation,
> in which the __GFP_FS is cleared, and basically the problem is very similar
> with that in system PM path.
I suspect that code is wrong. Or at least, suboptimal.
> Secondly, inside shrink_page_list(), pageout() may be triggered on dirty anon
> page if __GFP_FS is set.
pageout() should be called if GFP_FS is set or if GFP_IO is set and the
IO is against swap.
And that's what we want to happen: we want to enter the fs to try to
turn dirty pagecache into clean pagecache without doing IO. If we in
fact enter the device drivers when GFP_IO was not set then that's a bug
which we should fix.
> IMO, if performing I/O can be completely avoided when __GFP_FS is set, the
> flag can be kept, otherwise it is better to clear it in the situation.
yup.
> >
> > Also, you can probably put the unlikely() inside memalloc_noio() and
> > avoid repeating it at all the callsites.
> >
> > And it might be neater to do:
> >
> > /*
> > * Nice comment goes here
> > */
> > static inline gfp_t memalloc_noio_flags(gfp_t flags)
> > {
> > if (unlikely(current->flags & PF_MEMALLOC_NOIO))
> > flags &= ~GFP_IOFS;
> > return flags;
> > }
>
> But without the check in callsites, some local variables will be write
> two times,
> so it is better to not do it.
I don't see why - we just modify the incoming gfp_t at the start of the
function, then use it.
It gets a bit tricky with those struct initialisations. Things like
struct foo bar {
.a = a1,
.b = b1,
};
should not be turned into
struct foo bar {
.a = a1,
};
bar.b = b1;
and we don't want to do
struct foo bar { };
bar.a = a1;
bar.b = b1;
either, because these are indeed a double-write. But we can do
struct foo bar {
.flags = (flags = memalloc_noio_flags(flags)),
.b = b1,
};
which is a bit arcane but not toooo bad. Have a think about it...
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