Re: [patch 2/8] mm: vmscan: disregard swappiness shortly beforegoing OOM

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Thu Dec 13 2012 - 14:47:25 EST


On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 02:05:34PM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:34:20AM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 04:43:34PM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > > When a reclaim scanner is doing its final scan before giving up and
> > > there is swap space available, pay no attention to swappiness
> > > preference anymore. Just swap.
> > >
> > > Note that this change won't make too big of a difference for general
> > > reclaim: anonymous pages are already force-scanned when there is only
> > > very little file cache left, and there very likely isn't when the
> > > reclaimer enters this final cycle.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > Ok, I see the motivation for your patch but is the block inside still
> > wrong for what you want? After your patch the block looks like this
> >
> > if (sc->priority || noswap) {
> > scan >>= sc->priority;
> > if (!scan && force_scan)
> > scan = SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX;
> > scan = div64_u64(scan * fraction[file], denominator);
> > }
> >
> > if sc->priority == 0 and swappiness==0 then you enter this block but
> > fraction[0] for anonymous pages will also be 0 and because of the ordering
> > of statements there, scan will be
> >
> > scan = scan * 0 / denominator
> >
> > so you are still not reclaiming anonymous pages in the swappiness=0
> > case. What did I miss?
>
> Don't get confused by noswap, it is only set when there physically is
> no swap space. If !sc->priority, that block is skipped and
> fraction[0] does not matter.

/me slaps self

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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