Re: [patch] mm, vmpressure: add high level

From: David Rientjes
Date: Wed Oct 16 2013 - 23:44:19 EST


On Wed, 16 Oct 2013, Anton Vorontsov wrote:

> > Vmpressure has two important levels: medium and critical. Medium is
> > defined at 60% and critical is defined at 95%.
> >
> > We have a customer who needs a notification at a higher level than medium,
> > which is slight to moderate reclaim activity, and before critical to start
> > throttling incoming requests to save memory and avoid oom.
> >
> > This patch adds the missing link: a high level defined at 80%.
> >
> > In the future, it would probably be better to allow the user to specify an
> > integer ratio for the notification rather than relying on arbitrarily
> > specified levels.
>
> Does the customer need to differentiate the two levels (medium and high),
> or the customer only interested in this (80%) specific level?
>

Only high.

> In the latter case, instead of adding a new level I would vote for adding
> a [sysfs] knob for modifying medium level's threshold.
>

Hmm, doesn't seem like such a good idea. If one process depends on this
being 60% and another depends on it being 80%, we're stuck. I think it's
legitimate to have things like low, medium, high, and critical as rough
approximations (and to keep backwards compatibility), but as mentioned in
the changelog I want to extend the interface to allow integer writes to
specify their own ratio.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/