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Message-Id: <1187692586.6114.211.camel@twins>
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:36:26 +0200
From: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To: Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>
Cc: linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC 0/7] Postphone reclaim laundry to write at high water
marks
On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 14:50 -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> One of the problems with reclaim writeout is that it occurs when memory in a
> zone is low. A particular bad problem can occur if memory in a zone is
> already low and now the first page that we encounter during reclaim is dirty.
> So the writeout function is called without the filesystem or device having
> much of a reserve that would allow further allocations. Triggering writeout
> of dirty pages early does not improve the memory situation since the actual
> writeout of the page is a relatively long process. The call to writepage
> will therefore not improve the low memory situation but make it worse
> because extra memory may be needed to get the device to write the page.
>
> This patchset fixes that issue by:
>
> 1. First reclaiming non dirty pages. Dirty pages are deferred until reclaim
> has reestablished the high marks. Then all the dirty pages (the laundry)
> is written out.
>
> 2. Reclaim is essentially complete during the writeout phase. So we remove
> PF_MEMALLOC and allow recursive reclaim if we still run into trouble
> during writeout.
This almost insta-OOMs with anonymous workloads.
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