From fa5e084e43eb14c14942027e1e2e894aeed96097 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mel Gorman Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:33:22 -0700 Subject: vmscan: do not unconditionally treat zones that fail zone_reclaim() as full On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that is a more targetted form of direct reclaim. On machines with large NUMA distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not being met. The problem is that zone_reclaim() failing at all means the zone gets marked full. This can cause situations where a zone is usable, but is being skipped because it has been considered full. Take a situation where a large tmpfs mount is occuping a large percentage of memory overall. The pages do not get cleaned or reclaimed by zone_reclaim(), but the zone gets marked full and the zonelist cache considers them not worth trying in the future. This patch makes zone_reclaim() return more fine-grained information about what occured when zone_reclaim() failued. The zone only gets marked full if it really is unreclaimable. If it's a case that the scan did not occur or if enough pages were not reclaimed with the limited reclaim_mode, then the zone is simply skipped. There is a side-effect to this patch. Currently, if zone_reclaim() successfully reclaimed SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX, an allocation attempt would go ahead. With this patch applied, zone watermarks are rechecked after zone_reclaim() does some work. This bug was introduced by commit 9276b1bc96a132f4068fdee00983c532f43d3a26 ("memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup") way back in 2.6.19 when the zonelist_cache was introduced. It was not intended that zone_reclaim() aggressively consider the zone to be full when it failed as full direct reclaim can still be an option. Due to the age of the bug, it should be considered a -stable candidate. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/vmscan.c | 11 ++++++----- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) (limited to 'mm/vmscan.c') diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index 79a98d98ed33..16c82a868e2b 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -2492,16 +2492,16 @@ int zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order) */ if (zone_pagecache_reclaimable(zone) <= zone->min_unmapped_pages && zone_page_state(zone, NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE) <= zone->min_slab_pages) - return 0; + return ZONE_RECLAIM_FULL; if (zone_is_all_unreclaimable(zone)) - return 0; + return ZONE_RECLAIM_FULL; /* * Do not scan if the allocation should not be delayed. */ if (!(gfp_mask & __GFP_WAIT) || (current->flags & PF_MEMALLOC)) - return 0; + return ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN; /* * Only run zone reclaim on the local zone or on zones that do not @@ -2511,10 +2511,11 @@ int zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order) */ node_id = zone_to_nid(zone); if (node_state(node_id, N_CPU) && node_id != numa_node_id()) - return 0; + return ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN; if (zone_test_and_set_flag(zone, ZONE_RECLAIM_LOCKED)) - return 0; + return ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN; + ret = __zone_reclaim(zone, gfp_mask, order); zone_clear_flag(zone, ZONE_RECLAIM_LOCKED); -- cgit v1.2.3-55-g7522