On 09/20/2011 09:45 AM, Johannes Weiner wrote:

This patch allows allocators to pass __GFP_WRITE when they know in
advance that the allocated page will be written to and become dirty
soon.  The page allocator will then attempt to distribute those
allocations across zones, such that no single zone will end up full of
dirty, and thus more or less, unreclaimable pages.

The global dirty limits are put in proportion to the respective zone's
amount of dirtyable memory and allocations diverted to other zones
when the limit is reached.

For now, the problem remains for NUMA configurations where the zones
allowed for allocation are in sum not big enough to trigger the global
dirty limits, but a future approach to solve this can reuse the
per-zone dirty limit infrastructure laid out in this patch to have
dirty throttling and the flusher threads consider individual zones.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner<redacted>

Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <redacted>

The amount of work done in a __GFP_WRITE allocation looks
a little daunting, but doing that a million times probably
outweighs waiting on the disk even once, so...

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