Re: [PATCH 07/10] mm: vmscan: Block kswapd if it is encounteringpages under writeback

[Mel Gorman]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 07:37:42PM +0800, Simon Jeons wrote:
> On 03/17/2013 09:04 PM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> >Historically, kswapd used to congestion_wait() at higher priorities if it
> >was not making forward progress. This made no sense as the failure to make
> >progress could be completely independent of IO. It was later replaced by
> >wait_iff_congested() and removed entirely by commit 258401a6 (mm: don't
> >wait on congested zones in balance_pgdat()) as it was duplicating logic
> >in shrink_inactive_list().
> >
> >This is problematic. If kswapd encounters many pages under writeback and
> >it continues to scan until it reaches the high watermark then it will
> >quickly skip over the pages under writeback and reclaim clean young
> >pages or push applications out to swap.
> >
> >The use of wait_iff_congested() is not suited to kswapd as it will only
> >stall if the underlying BDI is really congested or a direct reclaimer was
> >unable to write to the underlying BDI. kswapd bypasses the BDI congestion
> >as it sets PF_SWAPWRITE but even if this was taken into account then it
> 
> Where will check this flag?
> 

may_write_to_queue

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs
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