Re: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Thu Nov 03 2005 - 19:40:12 EST


Martin J. Bligh wrote:
Ahh, you're right, there's a totally separate watermark for highmem.

I think I even remember this. I may even be responsible. I know some of our less successful highmem balancing efforts in the 2.4.x timeframe had serious trouble when they ran out of highmem, and started pruning lowmem very very aggressively. Limiting the highmem water marks meant that it wouldn't do that very often.

I think your patch may in fact be fine, but quite frankly, it needs testing under real load with highmem.


I'd prefer not. The reason is that it increases the "min"
watermark, which only gets used basically by GFP_ATOMIC and
PF_MEMALLOC allocators - neither of which are likely to want
highmem.

Also, I don't think anybody cares about higher order highmem
allocations. At least the patches in this thread:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113082256231168&w=2

Should be applied before this. However they also need more
testing so I'll be sending them to Andrew first.

Patch 2 does basically the same thing as your patch, without
increasing the min watermark.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

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