Re: [patch 2/8] mm: vmscan: disregard swappiness shortly beforegoing OOM

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Thu Dec 13 2012 - 05:34:12 EST


On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 04:43:34PM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> When a reclaim scanner is doing its final scan before giving up and
> there is swap space available, pay no attention to swappiness
> preference anymore. Just swap.
>
> Note that this change won't make too big of a difference for general
> reclaim: anonymous pages are already force-scanned when there is only
> very little file cache left, and there very likely isn't when the
> reclaimer enters this final cycle.
>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Ok, I see the motivation for your patch but is the block inside still
wrong for what you want? After your patch the block looks like this

if (sc->priority || noswap) {
scan >>= sc->priority;
if (!scan && force_scan)
scan = SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX;
scan = div64_u64(scan * fraction[file], denominator);
}

if sc->priority == 0 and swappiness==0 then you enter this block but
fraction[0] for anonymous pages will also be 0 and because of the ordering
of statements there, scan will be

scan = scan * 0 / denominator

so you are still not reclaiming anonymous pages in the swappiness=0
case. What did I miss?

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
--
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/