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    SubjectRe: Linux 2.4.10-pre11


    On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

    > On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 10:08:22PM -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
    > >
    > >
    > > On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
    > >
    > > >
    > > >
    > > > On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
    > > >
    > > > >
    > > > > Ok, the big thing here is continued merging, this time with Andrea.
    > > > >
    > > > > I still don't like some of the VM changes, but integrating Andrea's VM
    > > > > changes results in (a) better performance and (b) much cleaner inactive
    > > > > page handling in particular. Besides, for the 2.4.x tree, the big priority
    > > > > is stability, we can re-address my other concerns during 2.5.x.
    > > >
    > > > Andrea,
    > > >
    > > > Could you please make a resume of your VM changes ? 
    > > >
    > > > Its hard to keep up with VM changes this way.
    > >
    > > Andrea,
    > >
    > > I've just read a bit of your new VM code and I have a few comments.
    > >
    > > You completly removed the "inactive freeable pages" logic: There is no
    >
    > yes, it wasn't relly useful to keep this list lazily, you either keep it
    > enforced with locking overhead or such information isn't valuable.
    >
    > > more distiction between "freeable inactive" and "free" pages. All VM work
    > > is based on "freepages.high" watermark. I don't like that: it seems to
    >
    > hardly on freepages.high:
    >
    > diff -urN vm-ref/mm/swap.c vm/mm/swap.c
    > --- vm-ref/mm/swap.c Tue Sep 18 00:18:17 2001
    > +++ vm/mm/swap.c Tue Sep 18 00:18:35 2001
    > @@ -24,50 +24,13 @@
    > #include <asm/uaccess.h> /* for copy_to/from_user */
    > #include <asm/pgtable.h>
    >
    > -/*
    > - * We identify three levels of free memory. We never let free mem
    > - * fall below the freepages.min except for atomic allocations. We
    > - * start background swapping if we fall below freepages.high free
    > - * pages, and we begin intensive swapping below freepages.low.
    > - *
    > - * Actual initialization is done in mm/page_alloc.c
    > - */
    > -freepages_t freepages = {
    > - 0, /* freepages.min */
    > - 0, /* freepages.low */
    > - 0 /* freepages.high */
    > -};
    > -
    >
    > > make page freeing more aggressive over time.
    >
    > I don't see your point with "page freeing more aggressive over time".

    I meant "zone->freepages.high" (or something like that... you get the
    idea).

    My point is: we're not going to start aging pte's until we have a
    zone shortage, right ?

    With the old scheme, we would differentiate "inactive shortage" from "free
    shortage".

    >
    > > Also, if we have several try_to_free_pages() callers, for different
    > > classzones, I'm right saying that a caller with a "smaller" classzone can
    > > "hide" pages in its "active_local_lru" and/or "inactive_local_lru" (during
    > > shrink_cache) from other processes trying to free pages from those higher
    > > zones ?
    >
    > I'm deeply impressed, you seem to have understood the rewrite greatly
    > well, congrats, this "hiding" was infact my main concern I had on the
    > memclass check during shrink_cache, but I don't think this will ever
    > give us troubles. In such there are suprious swapouts with HIGHMEM
    > we'll just need to waste some cpu by lefting those pages visible with a
    > few changes in shrink_cache, but again I'm almost sure there won't be
    > problems, we do multiple scans before failing so those pages will return
    > visible before the other task has a chance to fail the allocation.

    I really think this will cause problems in practice, Andrea.

    Moreover, the whole active_local_lru has a _bad_ effect on writeout
    clustering:

    shrink_cache() callers on low classzone can "hide" pages from higher
    classzone callers and avoid clustering. Look:

    We have a nice big sequentially ordered list of pages to writeout.

    lowzone shrink_cache() moves higher zones pages (from this ordered list)
    to its inactive/active_local_lru until it calls schedule() (due to
    need_resched()). (for example)

    Now we have a higher classzone caller which finds "half of the block" and
    writes it out.

    >From this point on, we breaked in half an ordered list of pages which
    could be nicely merged together at ll_rw_block().

    The example I gave which splits one sequentially ordered list of pages in
    two blocks is a simple and "stupid" one. But think how badly can we have
    pages ordered during a long time of VM activity.



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