Re: shrink_all_memory tweaks (was: Re: Userland swsusp failure (mm-related))

[Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>]

On Monday 10 April 2006 06:36, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> Still I've been doing a crash course in mm internals recently and I can say
> a bit more about your patch now. ;-)

Great.
>
> First, I agree that using balance_pgdat() for freeing memory by swsusp is
> overkill, so the removal of its second argument seems to be a good idea to
> me.  However, I'd rather avoid modifying struct scan_control and
> shrink_zone() and reimplement the shrink_zone()'s logic directly in
> shrink_all_memory(), with some modifications (eg. we can explicitly avoid
> shrinking of the active list until we decide it's worth it) -- or we can
> define a separate function for this purpose.

I was trying to reuse as much code as possible.

> Second, there are a couple of details I'd do in a different way.  For
> example I think we should call shrink_slab() with the non-zero first
> argument (otherwise it'll use SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX)

Sounds good.

> and instead of setting 
> zone->prev_priority to 0 I'd set vm_swappiness to 100 temporarily
> (or maybe l'd left it to the user to set swappiness before suspend?).

Probably can't rely on just the user setting. Setting priority to 0 is 
explicit and overrides any swappiness setting which is a tunable. Priority 
will recover by itself unlike swappiness which needs to be set and reset.

> Also I think we can try to avoid slab shrinking until we start to shrink
> the active zone or IOW until we can't get any more pages from the inactive
> list alone.

I tried that and it didn't shrink enough, but then that's because of the 
SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX limit you mentioned above. But slab can be massive if you do 
for example a lot of 'find's and shrinking slab doesn't affect the user 
experence as much as shrinking the active/inactive lists.

> If you don't mind, I'll try to rework your patch a bit in accordance with
> the above remarks in the next couple of days.

By all means :)

-- 
-ck
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