Re: [PATCH 10/10] mm: per device dirty threshold

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



> > The other deadlock, in throttle_vm_writeout() is still to be solved.
> 
> Let's go back to the original changelog:
> 
> Author: marcelo.tosatti <marcelo.tosatti>
> Date:   Tue Mar 8 17:25:19 2005 +0000
> 
>     [PATCH] vm: pageout throttling
>     
>     With silly pageout testcases it is possible to place huge amounts of memory
>     under I/O.  With a large request queue (CFQ uses 8192 requests) it is
>     possible to place _all_ memory under I/O at the same time.
>     
>     This means that all memory is pinned and unreclaimable and the VM gets
>     upset and goes oom.
>     
>     The patch limits the amount of memory which is under pageout writeout to be
>     a little more than the amount of memory at which balance_dirty_pages()
>     callers will synchronously throttle.
>     
>     This means that heavy pageout activity can starve heavy writeback activity
>     completely, but heavy writeback activity will not cause starvation of
>     pageout.  Because we don't want a simple `dd' to be causing excessive
>     latencies in page reclaim.
>     
>     Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
>     Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
> 
> (A good one!  I wrote it ;))
> 
> 
> I believe that the combination of dirty-page-tracking and its calls to
> balance_dirty_pages() mean that we can now never get more than dirty_ratio
> of memory into the dirty-or-writeback condition.
> 
> The vm scanner can convert dirty pages into clean, under-writeback pages,
> but it cannot increase the total of dirty+writeback.

What about swapout?  That can increase the number of writeback pages,
without decreasing the number of dirty pages, no?

Miklos
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Photo]     [Stuff]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Linux for the blind]     [Linux Resources]
  Powered by Linux