Hi Linus,
the following patch does:
1) Remove GFP_BUFFER and HIGHMEM related deadlocks, by letting
these allocations fail instead of looping forever in
__alloc_pages() when they cannot make any progress there.
Now Linux no longer hangs on highmem machines with heavy
write loads.
2) Clean up the __alloc_pages() / __alloc_pages_limit() code
a bit, moving the direct reclaim condition from the latter
function into the former so we run it less often ;)
3) Remove the superfluous wakeups from __alloc_pages(), not
only are the tests a real CPU eater, they also have the
potential of waking up bdflush in a situation where it
shouldn't run in the first place. The kswapd wakeup didn't
seem to have any effect either.
4) Do make sure GFP_BUFFER allocations NEVER eat into the
very last pages of the system. It is important to preserve
the following ordering:
- normal allocations
- GFP_BUFFER
- atomic allocations
- other recursive allocations
Using this ordering, we can be pretty sure that eg. a
GFP_BUFFER allocation to swap something out to an
encrypted device won't eat the memory the device driver
will need to perform its functions. It also means that
a gigabit network flood won't eat those pages...
5) Change nr_free_buffer_pages() a bit to not return pages
which cannot be used as buffer pages, this makes a BIG
difference on highmem machines (which now DO have a working
write throttling again).
6) Simplify the refill_inactive() loop enough that it actually
works again. Calling page_launder() and shrink_i/d_memory()
by the same if condition means that the different caches
get balanced against each other again.
The illogical argument for not shrinking the slab cache
while we're under a free shortage turned out to be very
much illogical too. All needed buffer heads will have been
allocated in page_launder() and shrink_i/d_memory() before
we get here and we can be pretty sure that these functions
will keep re-using those same buffer heads as soon as the
IO finishes.
regards,
Rik
-- Linux MM bugzilla: http://linux-mm.org/bugzilla.shtmlVirtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose...
http://www.surriel.com/ http://www.conectiva.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 31 2001 - 21:00:25 EST