mm: vmscan: do not keep kswapd looping forever due to individual uncompactable zones
authorJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Tue, 4 Dec 2012 16:11:31 +0000 (11:11 -0500)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Thu, 6 Dec 2012 19:29:57 +0000 (11:29 -0800)
commitc702418f8a2fa6cc92e84a39880d458faf7af9cc
tree47dd6cd64f293c6956f7988503da2f3327094b84
parent60177d31d215bc2b4c5a7aa6f742800e04fa0a92
mm: vmscan: do not keep kswapd looping forever due to individual uncompactable zones

When a zone meets its high watermark and is compactable in case of
higher order allocations, it contributes to the percentage of the node's
memory that is considered balanced.

This requirement, that a node be only partially balanced, came about
when kswapd was desparately trying to balance tiny zones when all bigger
zones in the node had plenty of free memory.  Arguably, the same should
apply to compaction: if a significant part of the node is balanced
enough to run compaction, do not get hung up on that tiny zone that
might never get in shape.

When the compaction logic in kswapd is reached, we know that at least
25% of the node's memory is balanced properly for compaction (see
zone_balanced and pgdat_balanced).  Remove the individual zone checks
that restart the kswapd cycle.

Otherwise, we may observe more endless looping in kswapd where the
compaction code loops back to reclaim because of a single zone and
reclaim does nothing because the node is considered balanced overall.

See for example

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=866988

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reported-and-tested-by: Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora@leemhuis.info>
Reported-by: Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.cz>
Tested-by: John Ellson <john.ellson@comcast.net>
Tested-by: Zdenek Kabelac <zkabelac@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/vmscan.c
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