-
Andrew Morton authored
This patch is a general solution to the situation where a zone is full of pinned pages. This can come about if: a) Someone has allocated all of ZONE_DMA for IO buffers b) Some application is mlocking some memory and a zone ends up full of mlocked pages (can happen on a 1G ia32 system) c) All of ZONE_HIGHMEM is pinned in hugetlb pages (can happen on 1G machines) We'll currently burn 10% of CPU in kswapd when this happens, although it is quite hard to trigger. The algorithm is: - If page reclaim has scanned 2 * the total number of pages in the zone and there have been no pages freed in that zone then mark the zone as "all unreclaimable". - When a zone is "all unreclaimable" page reclaim almost ignores it. We will perform a "light" scan at DEF_PRIORITY (typically 1/4096'th of the zone, or 64 pages) and then forget about the zone. - When a batch of pages are freed into the zone, clear its "all unreclaimable" state and start full scanning again. The assumption being that some state change has come about which will make reclaim successful again. So if a "light scan" actually frees some pages, the zone will revert to normal state immediately. So we're effectively putting the zone into "low power" mode, and lightly polling it to see if something has changed. The code works OK, but is quite hard to test - I mainly tested it by pinning all highmem in hugetlb pages.
36fb7f84