This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled
vmscan: clear ZONE_CONGESTED for zone with good watermark
to the 3.0-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary
The filename of the patch is:
vmscan-clear-zone_congested-for-zone-with-good-watermark.patch
and it can be found in the queue-3.0 subdirectory.
If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree,
please let <[email protected]> know about it.
>From 439423f6894aa0dec22187526827456f5004baed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Shaohua Li <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:59:12 -0700
Subject: vmscan: clear ZONE_CONGESTED for zone with good watermark
From: Shaohua Li <[email protected]>
commit 439423f6894aa0dec22187526827456f5004baed upstream.
Stable note: Not tracked in Bugzilla. kswapd is responsible for clearing
ZONE_CONGESTED after it balances a zone and this patch fixes a bug
where that was failing to happen. Without this patch, processes
can stall in wait_iff_congested unnecessarily. For users, this can
look like an interactivity stall but some workloads would see it
as sudden drop in throughput.
ZONE_CONGESTED is only cleared in kswapd, but pages can be freed in any
task. It's possible ZONE_CONGESTED isn't cleared in some cases:
1. the zone is already balanced just entering balance_pgdat() for
order-0 because concurrent tasks free memory. In this case, later
check will skip the zone as it's balanced so the flag isn't cleared.
2. high order balance fallbacks to order-0. quote from Mel: At the
end of balance_pgdat(), kswapd uses the following logic;
If reclaiming at high order {
for each zone {
if all_unreclaimable
skip
if watermark is not met
order = 0
loop again
/* watermark is met */
clear congested
}
}
i.e. it clears ZONE_CONGESTED if it the zone is balanced. if not,
it restarts balancing at order-0. However, if the higher zones are
balanced for order-0, kswapd will miss clearing ZONE_CONGESTED as
that only happens after a zone is shrunk. This can mean that
wait_iff_congested() stalls unnecessarily.
This patch makes kswapd clear ZONE_CONGESTED during its initial
highmem->dma scan for zones that are already balanced.
Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>
---
mm/vmscan.c | 3 +++
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2456,6 +2456,9 @@ loop_again:
high_wmark_pages(zone), 0, 0)) {
end_zone = i;
break;
+ } else {
+ /* If balanced, clear the congested flag */
+ zone_clear_flag(zone, ZONE_CONGESTED);
}
}
if (i < 0)
Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are
queue-3.0/vmscan-clear-zone_congested-for-zone-with-good-watermark.patch
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