Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > For example, a memory-backed filesystem may be trying to allocate GFP_NOFS
> > memory while holding filesystem locks which are taken by its writepage.
> >
> > How about adding a new field to backing_dev_info for this case? Damned if I
> > can think of a name for it though.
>
> I think you're overcomplicating it. Of the existing memory_backed bdis
> (ramdisk, hugetlbfs, ramfs, sysfs, tmpfs, swap) only two have non-NULL
> writepage, and both of those two go (indirectly and directly) to swap
> (and neither holds FS lock while waiting to allocate memory).
But this is a much nicer patch. Thanks for doing all this btw. I was
barfing at ?:, not your code ;)
> If we were looking for a correct solution, I don't think backing_dev_info
> would be the right place: we're talking about GFP_ needed for writepage,
> which should be specified in the struct address_space filled in by the
> FS: I think it's more a limitation of the FS than its backing device.
Good point.
> + bdi = mapping->backing_dev_info;
> + if (bdi->swap_backed)
> + gfp_needed_for_writepage = __GFP_IO;
> + else
> + gfp_needed_for_writepage = __GFP_FS;
> + if (!(gfp_mask & gfp_needed_for_writepage))
This is inaccurate? shmem_writepage() performs no IO and could/should be
called even for GFP_NOIO allocations.
It's probably not very important but if we're going to make a change it may
as well be the right one.
Could you live with
if (bdi->has_special_writepage)
gfp_needed_for_writepage = bfi->gfp_needed_for_writepage;
? So swap_backing_dev_info uses __GFP_IO and shmem_backing_dev_info() (which
is competely atomic) uses zero?
Yeah, it's a bit awkward. I'm OK with the special-casing. Both swap and
tmpfs _are_ special, and unique. Recognising that fact in vmscan.c is
reasonable. ->gfp_needed_for_writepage should probably be in the superblock,
but that's just too far away.
> - int memory_backed; /* Cannot clean pages with writepage */
> + unsigned int
> + memory_backed:1,/* Do not count its dirty pages in nr_dirty */
> + swap_backed:1; /* Its memory_backed writepage goes to swap */
> };
Hard call. It is a tradeoff between icache misses and dcache misses.
Obviously that is trivia in this case.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 31 2003 - 22:00:26 EST