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authorMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>2009-06-16 15:33:22 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-06-16 19:47:45 -0700
commitfa5e084e43eb14c14942027e1e2e894aeed96097 (patch)
tree3e7ebf714858e8dd1de7042fd1ef62294a3ec20f /mm/vmstat.c
parent90afa5de6f3fa89a733861e843377302479fcf7e (diff)
vmscan: do not unconditionally treat zones that fail zone_reclaim() as full
On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that is a more targetted form of direct reclaim. On machines with large NUMA distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not being met. The problem is that zone_reclaim() failing at all means the zone gets marked full. This can cause situations where a zone is usable, but is being skipped because it has been considered full. Take a situation where a large tmpfs mount is occuping a large percentage of memory overall. The pages do not get cleaned or reclaimed by zone_reclaim(), but the zone gets marked full and the zonelist cache considers them not worth trying in the future. This patch makes zone_reclaim() return more fine-grained information about what occured when zone_reclaim() failued. The zone only gets marked full if it really is unreclaimable. If it's a case that the scan did not occur or if enough pages were not reclaimed with the limited reclaim_mode, then the zone is simply skipped. There is a side-effect to this patch. Currently, if zone_reclaim() successfully reclaimed SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX, an allocation attempt would go ahead. With this patch applied, zone watermarks are rechecked after zone_reclaim() does some work. This bug was introduced by commit 9276b1bc96a132f4068fdee00983c532f43d3a26 ("memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup") way back in 2.6.19 when the zonelist_cache was introduced. It was not intended that zone_reclaim() aggressively consider the zone to be full when it failed as full direct reclaim can still be an option. Due to the age of the bug, it should be considered a -stable candidate. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/vmstat.c')
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