Re: VM/VFS bug with large amount of memory and file systems?

[Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>]

Nick Piggin wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 September 2007 03:04, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > Nick Piggin wrote:
> > > (Rik has a patch sitting in -mm I believe which would make this problem
> > > even worse, by doing even less highmem scanning in response to lowmem
> > > allocations).
> > My patch should not make any difference here, since
> > balance_pgdat() already scans the zones from high to
> > low and sets an end_zone variable that determines the
> > highest zone to scan.
> >
> > All my patch does is make sure that we do not try to
> > reclaim excessive amounts of dma or low memory when
> > a higher zone is full.
>
> Sorry, yeah I had it the wrong way around. Your patch would not
> increase the probability of this problem.
>
> We could have some logic in there to scan highmem when buffer
> heads are over limit. But that really kind of sucks in that it introduces
> some arbitrary point where reclaim behaviour completely changes...
> Adding a shrinker for buffer heads is the "logical" approach 

Christoph Lameter's slab defragmenting patch set does
this.  One reason Andrew has not merged that code yet
is a lack of reviewers, so I am going through it with
a fine comb and hope to have the patches reviewed by
the end of today.

Lets get this bug fixed the right way.

--
Politics is the struggle between those who want to make their country
the best in the world, and those who believe it already is.  Each group
calls the other unpatriotic.
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