[PATCH 3.16 142/157] proc: meminfo: estimate available memory more conservatively

[Ben Hutchings]

3.16.72-rc1 review patch.  If anyone has any objections, please let me know.

------------------

From: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

commit 84ad5802a33a4964a49b8f7d24d80a214a096b19 upstream.

The MemAvailable item in /proc/meminfo is to give users a hint of how
much memory is allocatable without causing swapping, so it excludes the
zones' low watermarks as unavailable to userspace.

However, for a userspace allocation, kswapd will actually reclaim until
the free pages hit a combination of the high watermark and the page
allocator's lowmem protection that keeps a certain amount of DMA and
DMA32 memory from userspace as well.

Subtract the full amount we know to be unavailable to userspace from the
number of free pages when calculating MemAvailable.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
 fs/proc/meminfo.c | 5 +----
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 4 deletions(-)

--- a/fs/proc/meminfo.c
+++ b/fs/proc/meminfo.c
@@ -57,11 +57,8 @@ static int meminfo_proc_show(struct seq_
 	/*
 	 * Estimate the amount of memory available for userspace allocations,
 	 * without causing swapping.
-	 *
-	 * Free memory cannot be taken below the low watermark, before the
-	 * system starts swapping.
 	 */
-	available = i.freeram - wmark_low;
+	available = i.freeram - totalreserve_pages;
 
 	/*
 	 * Not all the page cache can be freed, otherwise the system will