Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 14 May 2013 17:06:54 -0400 | From | Rik van Riel <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 7/9] mm: vmscan: Block kswapd if it is encountering pages under writeback |
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On 05/13/2013 04:12 AM, Mel Gorman wrote: > Historically, kswapd used to congestion_wait() at higher priorities if it > was not making forward progress. This made no sense as the failure to make > progress could be completely independent of IO. It was later replaced by > wait_iff_congested() and removed entirely by commit 258401a6 (mm: don't > wait on congested zones in balance_pgdat()) as it was duplicating logic > in shrink_inactive_list(). > > This is problematic. If kswapd encounters many pages under writeback and > it continues to scan until it reaches the high watermark then it will > quickly skip over the pages under writeback and reclaim clean young > pages or push applications out to swap. > > The use of wait_iff_congested() is not suited to kswapd as it will only > stall if the underlying BDI is really congested or a direct reclaimer was > unable to write to the underlying BDI. kswapd bypasses the BDI congestion > as it sets PF_SWAPWRITE but even if this was taken into account then it > would cause direct reclaimers to stall on writeback which is not desirable. > > This patch sets a ZONE_WRITEBACK flag if direct reclaim or kswapd is > encountering too many pages under writeback. If this flag is set and > kswapd encounters a PageReclaim page under writeback then it'll assume > that the LRU lists are being recycled too quickly before IO can complete > and block waiting for some IO to complete. > > Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> > Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
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