Re: [PATCH] vmscan: skip freeing memory from zones with lots free

From: Rik van Riel
Date: Sat Nov 29 2008 - 13:59:38 EST


Andrew Morton wrote:
On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:41:34 -0500 Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Andrew Morton wrote:
On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:58:32 -0500 Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Will this new patch reintroduce the problem which
26e4931632352e3c95a61edac22d12ebb72038fe fixed?
No, that problem is already taken care of by the fact that
active pages always get deactivated in the current VM,
regardless of whether or not they were referenced.

err, sorry, that was the wrong commit. 26e4931632352e3c95a61edac22d12ebb72038fe _introduced_ the problem, as
predicted in the changelog.

265b2b8cac1774f5f30c88e0ab8d0bcf794ef7b3 later fixed it up.

The patch I sent in this thread does not do any baling out,
it only skips zones where the number of free pages is more
than 4 times zone->pages_high.

Equal pressure is still applied to the other zones.

This should not be a problem since we do not enter direct
reclaim unless the free pages in every zone in our zonelist
are below zone->pages_low.

Zone skipping is only done by tasks that have been in the
direct reclaim code for a long time.

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