On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 05:02:51PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > * Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > In the full-flushing case (v6 without patch 4) the batching limit is > > > 'infinite', we'll batch as long as possible, right? > > > > No because we must flush before pages are freed so the maximum batching is > > related to SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX. If we free a page before the flush then in theory > > the page can be reallocated and a stale TLB entry can allow access to unrelated > > data. It would be almost impossible to trigger corruption this way but it's a > > concern. > > Well, could we say double SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX to further reduce the IPI rate? > We could but it's a suprisingly subtle change. The impacts I can think of are; 1. LRU lock hold times increase slightly because more pages are being isolated 2. There are slight timing changes due to more pages having to be processed before they are freed. There is a slight risk that more pages than are necessary get reclaimed but I doubt it'll be measurable 3. There is a risk that too_many_isolated checks will be easier to trigger resulting in a HZ/10 stall 4. The rotation rate of active->inactive is slightly faster but there should be fewer rotations before the lists get balanced so it shouldn't matter. 5. More pages are reclaimed in a single pass if zone_reclaim_mode is active but that thing sucks hard when it's enabled no matter what 6. More pages are isolated for compaction so page hold times there are longer while they are being copied There might be others. To be honest, I'm struggling to think of any serious problems such a change would cause. The biggest risk is issue 3 but I expect that hitting that requires that the system is already getting badly hammered. The main downside is that it affects all page reclaim activity, not just the mapped pages which are triggering the IPIs. I'll add a patch to the series that alters SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX with the intent to further reduce IPIs and see what falls out and see if any other VM person complains. -- Mel Gorman SUSE Labs -- 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/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>