From ab8fabd46f811d5153d8a0cd2fac9a0d41fb593d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Johannes Weiner Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:07:42 -0800 Subject: mm: exclude reserved pages from dirtyable memory Per-zone dirty limits try to distribute page cache pages allocated for writing across zones in proportion to the individual zone sizes, to reduce the likelihood of reclaim having to write back individual pages from the LRU lists in order to make progress. This patch: The amount of dirtyable pages should not include the full number of free pages: there is a number of reserved pages that the page allocator and kswapd always try to keep free. The closer (reclaimable pages - dirty pages) is to the number of reserved pages, the more likely it becomes for reclaim to run into dirty pages: +----------+ --- | anon | | +----------+ | | | | | | -- dirty limit new -- flusher new | file | | | | | | | | | -- dirty limit old -- flusher old | | | +----------+ --- reclaim | reserved | +----------+ | kernel | +----------+ This patch introduces a per-zone dirty reserve that takes both the lowmem reserve as well as the high watermark of the zone into account, and a global sum of those per-zone values that is subtracted from the global amount of dirtyable pages. The lowmem reserve is unavailable to page cache allocations and kswapd tries to keep the high watermark free. We don't want to end up in a situation where reclaim has to clean pages in order to balance zones. Not treating reserved pages as dirtyable on a global level is only a conceptual fix. In reality, dirty pages are not distributed equally across zones and reclaim runs into dirty pages on a regular basis. But it is important to get this right before tackling the problem on a per-zone level, where the distance between reclaim and the dirty pages is mostly much smaller in absolute numbers. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix highmem build] Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Acked-by: Mel Gorman Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Christoph Hellwig Cc: Wu Fengguang Cc: Dave Chinner Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Shaohua Li Cc: Chris Mason Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- include/linux/mmzone.h | 6 ++++++ include/linux/swap.h | 1 + 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+) (limited to 'include/linux') diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h index 3ac040f1936..ca6ca92418a 100644 --- a/include/linux/mmzone.h +++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h @@ -317,6 +317,12 @@ struct zone { */ unsigned long lowmem_reserve[MAX_NR_ZONES]; + /* + * This is a per-zone reserve of pages that should not be + * considered dirtyable memory. + */ + unsigned long dirty_balance_reserve; + #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA int node; /* diff --git a/include/linux/swap.h b/include/linux/swap.h index 1e22e126d2a..06061a7f8e6 100644 --- a/include/linux/swap.h +++ b/include/linux/swap.h @@ -207,6 +207,7 @@ struct swap_list_t { /* linux/mm/page_alloc.c */ extern unsigned long totalram_pages; extern unsigned long totalreserve_pages; +extern unsigned long dirty_balance_reserve; extern unsigned int nr_free_buffer_pages(void); extern unsigned int nr_free_pagecache_pages(void); -- cgit v1.2.3