[VM PATCH] Faster reclamation of dirty pages and unused inode/dcache entries in 2.4.22

[Shantanu Goel]

Hi kernel hackers,

The VM subsystem in Linux 2.4.22 can cause spurious
swapouts in the presence of lots of dirty pages. 
Presently, as dirty pages are encountered,
shrink_cache() schedules a writepage() and moves the
page to the head of the inactive list.  When a lot of
dirty pages are present, this can break the FIFO
ordering of the inactive list because clean pages
further down the list will be reclaimed first.  The
following patch records the pages being laundered, and
once SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages have been accumulated or
the scan is complete, goes back and attempts to move
them back to the tail of the list.

The second part of the patch reclaims unused
inode/dentry/dquot entries more aggressively.  I have
observed that on an NFS server where swap out activity
is low, the VM can shrink the page cache to the point
where most pages are used up by unused inode/dentry
entries.  This is because page cache reclamation
succeeds most of the time except when a swap_out()
happens.

Feedback and comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Shantanu Goel

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Attachment: 2.4.22-vm-writeback-inode.patch
Description: 2.4.22-vm-writeback-inode.patch