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Message-ID: <46F3EE62.9010907@redhat.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:16:34 -0400
From: Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@...hat.com>
To: Hugh Dickins <hugh@...itas.com>
CC: Andy Whitcroft <apw@...dowen.org>,
Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
Matthias Hensler <matthias@...se.de>,
linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
richard kennedy <richard@....demon.co.uk>,
Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>
Subject: Re: Processes spinning forever, apparently in lock_timer_base()?
On 09/21/2007 11:58 AM, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> Looking at the 2.6.18-2.6.23 code, I'm uncertain what to try instead.
> There is a refresh_vm_stats function which we could call (then retest
> the break condition) just before resorting to congestion_wait. But
> the big NUMA people might get very upset with me calling that too
> often: causing a thundering herd of bouncing cachelines which that
> was all designed to avoid. And it's not obvious to me what condition
> to test for dirty_thresh "too low".
>
> I believe Peter gave all this quite a lot of thought when he was
> making the rc6-mm1 changes, and I'd rather defer to him for a
> suggestion of what best to do in earlier releases. Or maybe he'll
> just point out how this couldn't have been a problem before.
>
> Or there is is Richard's patch, which I haven't considered, but
> Andrew was not quite satisfied with it - partly because he'd like
> to understand how the situation could come about first, perhaps
> we have now got an explanation.
>
My patch is just Richard's with the added requirement that we loop
some minimum number of times before exiting balance_dirty_pages()
with unfinished work.
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