Thread (39 messages) 39 messages, 7 authors, 2011-07-22

Re: [PATCH 1/4] mm: vmscan: Correct check for kswapd sleeping in sleeping_prematurely

From: Minchan Kim <hidden>
Date: 2011-06-27 06:11:22
Also in: lkml

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:44 PM, Mel Gorman [off-list ref] wrote:
During allocator-intensive workloads, kswapd will be woken frequently
causing free memory to oscillate between the high and min watermark.
This is expected behaviour.

A problem occurs if the highest zone is small.  balance_pgdat()
only considers unreclaimable zones when priority is DEF_PRIORITY
but sleeping_prematurely considers all zones. It's possible for this
sequence to occur

 1. kswapd wakes up and enters balance_pgdat()
 2. At DEF_PRIORITY, marks highest zone unreclaimable
 3. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, ignores highest zone setting end_zone
 4. At DEF_PRIORITY-1, calls shrink_slab freeing memory from
       highest zone, clearing all_unreclaimable. Highest zone
       is still unbalanced
 5. kswapd returns and calls sleeping_prematurely
 6. sleeping_prematurely looks at *all* zones, not just the ones
    being considered by balance_pgdat. The highest small zone
    has all_unreclaimable cleared but but the zone is not
    balanced. all_zones_ok is false so kswapd stays awake

This patch corrects the behaviour of sleeping_prematurely to check
the zones balance_pgdat() checked.

Reported-and-tested-by: Pádraig Brady <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <redacted>

-- 
Kind regards,
Minchan Kim

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