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

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Message-ID: <46EFE3AE.9040909@redhat.com>
Date:	Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:41:50 -0400
From:	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>
To:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
CC:	Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@....ac.uk>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux Memory Management List <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	marc.smith@...ail.mcc.edu
Subject: Re: VM/VFS bug with large amount of memory and file systems?

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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