Re: [PATCH 06/27] mm, vmscan: Make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes

From: Vlastimil Babka
Date: Wed Jun 15 2016 - 10:23:19 EST


On 06/09/2016 08:04 PM, Mel Gorman wrote:
Patch "mm: vmscan: Begin reclaiming pages on a per-node basis" started
thinking of reclaim in terms of nodes but kswapd is still zone-centric. This
patch gets rid of many of the node-based versus zone-based decisions.

o A node is considered balanced when any eligible lower zone is balanced.
This eliminates one class of age-inversion problem because we avoid
reclaiming a newer page just because it's in the wrong zone
o pgdat_balanced disappears because we now only care about one zone being
balanced.
o Some anomalies related to writeback and congestion tracking being based on
zones disappear.
o kswapd no longer has to take care to reclaim zones in the reverse order
that the page allocator uses.
o Most importantly of all, reclaim from node 0 with multiple zones will
have similar aging and reclaiming characteristics as every
other node.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>