On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Andrew Morton wrote:
> William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> >
> > William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> > >> MemTotal: 32107256 kB
> > >> MemFree: 27564648 kB
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 09:58:43PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > I'd be suspecting that your node fallback is bust.
> > > Suggest you add a call to show_free_areas() somewhere; consider
> > > exposing the full per-zone status via /proc with a proper patch.
> >
> > I went through the nodes by hand. It's just a run of the mill
> > ZONE_NORMAL OOM coming out of the GFP_USER allocation. None of
> > the highmem zones were anywhere near ->pages_low.
> >
>
> erk. Why is shmem using GFP_USER?
>
> mnm:/usr/src/25> grep page_address mm/shmem.c
> mnm:/usr/src/25>
shmem uses GFP_USER for its index pages to GFP_HIGHUSER data pages.
Not to say there aren't other problems in the mix too, but Bill's
main problem here will be one you discovered a while ago, Andrew.
We fixed it then, but in my loopable tmpfs version, and I've been
slow to extract the fixes and push them to mainline (or now -mm),
since there's not much else that suffers than dbench.
The problem is that dbench likes to do large random(?) seeks and
then writes at resulting offset; and although shmem-tmpfs imposes
a cap (default: half of memory) on the data pages, it imposes no
cap on its index pages. So it foolishly ends up filling normal
zone with empty index blocks for zero-length files, the index
page allocation being done _before_ the data cap check.
I'll rebase the relevant fixes against 2.5.35-mm1 later today,
do a little testing and post the patch.
What I never did was try GFP_HIGHUSER and kmap on the index pages:
I think I decided back then that it wasn't likely to be needed
(sparsely filled file indexes are a rarer case than sparsely filled
pagetables, once the stupidity is fixed; and small files don't use
index pages at all). But Bill's testing may well prove me wrong.
Hugh
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Sep 23 2002 - 22:00:18 EST