Swappiness isn't a safe sysctl.  Setting it to 0 for example can hang a
system.  That's a corner case but even setting it to 10 or lower can waste
enormous amounts of cpu without making much progress.  We've customers who
wants to use swappiness but they can't because of the current
implementation (if you change it so the system stops swapping it really
stops swapping and nothing works sane anymore if you really had to swap
something to make progress).

This patch from Kurt Garloff makes swappiness safer to use (no more huge
cpu usage or hangs with low swappiness values).

I think the prev_priority can also be nuked since it wastes 4 bytes per
zone (that would be an incremental patch but I wait the nr_scan_[in]active
to be nuked first for similar reasons).  Clearly somebody at some point
noticed how broken that thing was and they had to add min(priority,
prev_priority) to give it some reliability, but they didn't go the last
mile to nuke prev_priority too.  Calculating distress only in function of
not-racy priority is correct and sure more than enough without having to
add randomness into the equation.

Patch is tested on older kernels but it compiles and it's quite simple
so...

Overall I'm not very satisified by the swappiness tweak, since it doesn't
rally do anything with the dirty pagecache that may be inactive.  We need
another kind of tweak that controls the inactive scan and tunes the
can_writepage feature (not yet in mainline despite having submitted it a
few times), not only the active one.  That new tweak will tell the kernel
how hard to scan the inactive list for pure clean pagecache (something the
mainline kernel isn't capable of yet).  We already have that feature
working in all our enterprise kernels with the default reasonable tune, or
they can't even run a readonly backup with tar without triggering huge
write I/O.  I think it should be available also in mainline later.

Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Kurt Garloff <garloff@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>