From fa5e084e43eb14c14942027e1e2e894aeed96097 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mel Gorman Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:33:22 -0700 Subject: vmscan: do not unconditionally treat zones that fail zone_reclaim() as full On NUMA machines, the administrator can configure zone_reclaim_mode that is a more targetted form of direct reclaim. On machines with large NUMA distances for example, a zone_reclaim_mode defaults to 1 meaning that clean unmapped pages will be reclaimed if the zone watermarks are not being met. The problem is that zone_reclaim() failing at all means the zone gets marked full. This can cause situations where a zone is usable, but is being skipped because it has been considered full. Take a situation where a large tmpfs mount is occuping a large percentage of memory overall. The pages do not get cleaned or reclaimed by zone_reclaim(), but the zone gets marked full and the zonelist cache considers them not worth trying in the future. This patch makes zone_reclaim() return more fine-grained information about what occured when zone_reclaim() failued. The zone only gets marked full if it really is unreclaimable. If it's a case that the scan did not occur or if enough pages were not reclaimed with the limited reclaim_mode, then the zone is simply skipped. There is a side-effect to this patch. Currently, if zone_reclaim() successfully reclaimed SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX, an allocation attempt would go ahead. With this patch applied, zone watermarks are rechecked after zone_reclaim() does some work. This bug was introduced by commit 9276b1bc96a132f4068fdee00983c532f43d3a26 ("memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup") way back in 2.6.19 when the zonelist_cache was introduced. It was not intended that zone_reclaim() aggressively consider the zone to be full when it failed as full direct reclaim can still be an option. Due to the age of the bug, it should be considered a -stable candidate. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/page_alloc.c | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++---- 1 file changed, 22 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) (limited to 'mm/page_alloc.c') diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c index 6407cbfccd7..2f457a756d4 100644 --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -1462,15 +1462,33 @@ zonelist_scan: BUILD_BUG_ON(ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS < NR_WMARK); if (!(alloc_flags & ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS)) { unsigned long mark; + int ret; + mark = zone->watermark[alloc_flags & ALLOC_WMARK_MASK]; - if (!zone_watermark_ok(zone, order, mark, - classzone_idx, alloc_flags)) { - if (!zone_reclaim_mode || - !zone_reclaim(zone, gfp_mask, order)) + if (zone_watermark_ok(zone, order, mark, + classzone_idx, alloc_flags)) + goto try_this_zone; + + if (zone_reclaim_mode == 0) + goto this_zone_full; + + ret = zone_reclaim(zone, gfp_mask, order); + switch (ret) { + case ZONE_RECLAIM_NOSCAN: + /* did not scan */ + goto try_next_zone; + case ZONE_RECLAIM_FULL: + /* scanned but unreclaimable */ + goto this_zone_full; + default: + /* did we reclaim enough */ + if (!zone_watermark_ok(zone, order, mark, + classzone_idx, alloc_flags)) goto this_zone_full; } } +try_this_zone: page = buffered_rmqueue(preferred_zone, zone, order, gfp_mask, migratetype); if (page) -- cgit v1.2.3