Re: [PATCH 3/7] writeback: introduce smoothed global dirty limit

From: Wu Fengguang
Date: Sun Jun 19 2011 - 11:55:55 EST


On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 11:36:37PM +0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 11:01:11PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > The start of a heavy weight application (ie. KVM) may instantly knock
> > down determine_dirtyable_memory() and hence the global/bdi dirty
> > thresholds.
> >
> > So introduce global_dirty_limit for tracking the global dirty threshold
> > with policies
> >
> > - follow downwards slowly
> > - follow up in one shot
> >
> > global_dirty_limit can effectively mask out the impact of sudden drop of
> > dirtyable memory. It will be used in the next patch for two new type of
> > dirty limits.
>
> This needs to be explained in more detail in comments near the actual
> code.

Good point! This is the added comment for the update_dirty_limit() function.

/*
* The global dirtyable memory and dirty threshold could be suddenly knocked
* down by a large amount (eg. on the startup of KVM). This may throw the
* system into deep dirty exceeded state and throttled to "death" for a couple
* of seconds. The solution is to maintain global_dirty_limit for tracking
* slowly down to the knocked down dirty threshold.
*/
static void update_dirty_limit(unsigned long thresh,
unsigned long dirty)

Thanks,
Fengguang
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