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author | Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> | 2011-07-08 15:39:36 -0700 |
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committer | Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> | 2011-07-08 21:14:42 -0700 |
commit | 08951e545918c1594434d000d88a7793e2452a9b (patch) | |
tree | 56f91aba454751e2b6bcd67945ed2d4ebbeb2025 | |
parent | 902daf6580cffe04721250fb71b5527a98718b11 (diff) | |
download | kernel_samsung_smdk4412-08951e545918c1594434d000d88a7793e2452a9b.zip kernel_samsung_smdk4412-08951e545918c1594434d000d88a7793e2452a9b.tar.gz kernel_samsung_smdk4412-08951e545918c1594434d000d88a7793e2452a9b.tar.bz2 |
mm: vmscan: correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely
During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently
causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark. This
is expected behaviour. Unfortunately, if the highest zone is small, a
problem occurs.
This seems to happen most with recent sandybridge laptops but it's
probably a co-incidence as some of these laptops just happen to have a
small Normal zone. The reproduction case is almost always during copying
large files that kswapd pegs at 100% CPU until the file is deleted or
cache is dropped.
The problem is mostly down to sleeping_prematurely() keeping kswapd awake
when the highest zone is small and unreclaimable and compounded by the
fact we shrink slabs even when not shrinking zones causing a lot of time
to be spent in shrinkers and a lot of memory to be reclaimed.
Patch 1 corrects sleeping_prematurely to check the zones matching
the classzone_idx instead of all zones.
Patch 2 avoids shrinking slab when we are not shrinking a zone.
Patch 3 notes that sleeping_prematurely is checking lower zones against
a high classzone which is not what allocators or balance_pgdat()
is doing leading to an artifical belief that kswapd should be
still awake.
Patch 4 notes that when balance_pgdat() gives up on a high zone that the
decision is not communicated to sleeping_prematurely()
This problem affects 2.6.38.8 for certain and is expected to affect 2.6.39
and 3.0-rc4 as well. If accepted, they need to go to -stable to be picked
up by distros and this series is against 3.0-rc4. I've cc'd people that
reported similar problems recently to see if they still suffer from the
problem and if this fixes it.
This patch: correct the check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely()
During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently
causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark. This
is expected behaviour.
A problem occurs if the highest zone is small. balance_pgdat() only
considers unreclaimable zones when priority is DEF_PRIORITY but
sleeping_prematurely considers all zones. It's possible for this sequence
to occur
1. kswapd wakes up and enters balance_pgdat()
2. At DEF_PRIORITY, marks highest zone unreclaimable
3. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, ignores highest zone setting end_zone
4. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, calls shrink_slab freeing memory from
highest zone, clearing all_unreclaimable. Highest zone
is still unbalanced
5. kswapd returns and calls sleeping_prematurely
6. sleeping_prematurely looks at *all* zones, not just the ones
being considered by balance_pgdat. The highest small zone
has all_unreclaimable cleared but the zone is not
balanced. all_zones_ok is false so kswapd stays awake
This patch corrects the behaviour of sleeping_prematurely to check the
zones balance_pgdat() checked.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reported-by: Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com>
Tested-by: Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com>
Tested-by: Andrew Lutomirski <luto@mit.edu>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
-rw-r--r-- | mm/vmscan.c | 2 |
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index 4f49535..04c49fe 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -2326,7 +2326,7 @@ static bool sleeping_prematurely(pg_data_t *pgdat, int order, long remaining, return true; /* Check the watermark levels */ - for (i = 0; i < pgdat->nr_zones; i++) { + for (i = 0; i <= classzone_idx; i++) { struct zone *zone = pgdat->node_zones + i; if (!populated_zone(zone)) |