linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 07/34] mm, vmscan: make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes

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Message-Id: <20160831173320.GA5851@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Date:   Wed, 31 Aug 2016 23:03:20 +0530
From:   Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:     Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>, Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>,
        Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@....com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org,
        Mahesh Salgaonkar <mahesh@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Hari Bathini <hbathini@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 07/34] mm, vmscan: make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes

> mm, vmscan: Only allocate and reclaim from zones with pages managed by the buddy allocator
> 
> Firmware Assisted Dump (FA_DUMP) on ppc64 reserves substantial amounts
> of memory when booting a secondary kernel. Srikar Dronamraju reported that
> multiple nodes may have no memory managed by the buddy allocator but still
> return true for populated_zone().
> 
> Commit 1d82de618ddd ("mm, vmscan: make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes")
> was reported to cause kswapd to spin at 100% CPU usage when fadump was
> enabled. The old code happened to deal with the situation of a populated
> node with zero free pages by co-incidence but the current code tries to
> reclaim populated zones without realising that is impossible.
> 
> We cannot just convert populated_zone() as many existing users really
> need to check for present_pages. This patch introduces a managed_zone()
> helper and uses it in the few cases where it is critical that the check
> is made for managed pages -- zonelist constuction and page reclaim.

one nit
s/constuction/construction/

> 

Verified that it works fine.

-- 
Thanks and Regards
Srikar Dronamraju