1. 01 Aug, 2003 24 commits
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] vmscan: decaying average of zone pressure · ecbeb4b2
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Nikita Danilov <Nikita@Namesys.COM>
      
      The vmscan logic at present will scan the inactive list with increasing
      priority until a threshold is triggered.  At that threshold we start
      unmapping pages from pagetables.
      
      The problem is that each time someone calls into this code, the priority is
      initially low, so some mapped pages will be refiled event hough we really
      should be unmapping them now.
      
      Nikita's patch adds the `pressure' field to struct zone.  it is a decaying
      average of the zone's memory pressure and allows us to start unmapping pages
      immediately on entry to page reclaim, based on measurements which were made
      in earlier reclaim attempts.
      ecbeb4b2
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] fix kswapd throttling · 00401a44
      Andrew Morton authored
      kswapd currently takes a throttling nap even if it freed all the pages it
      was asked to free.
      
      Change it so we only throttle if reclaim is not being sufficiently
      successful.
      00401a44
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] use mark_page_accessed() in the write() path · ed8ff7a4
      Andrew Morton authored
      We're currently just setting the referenced bit when modifying pagecache in
      write().
      
      Consequently overwritten (and redirtied) pages are remaining on the inactive
      list.  The net result is that a lot of dirty pages are reaching the tail of
      the LRU in page reclaim and are getting written via the writepage() in there.
      
      But a core design objective is to minimise the amount of IO via that path,
      and to maximise the amount of IO via balance_dirty_pages().  Because the
      latter has better IO patterns.
      
      This may explain the bad IO patterns which Gerrit talked about at KS.
      ed8ff7a4
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] devfs_lookup stack corruption fix rework · 9f49f9f3
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Andrey Borzenkov <arvidjaar@mail.ru>
      
      A while back Andrey fixed a devfs bug in which we were running
      remove_wait_queue() against a wait_queue_head which was on another process's
      stack, and which had gone out of scope.
      
      The patch reverts that fix and does it the same way as 2.4: just leave the
      waitqueue struct dangling on the waitqueue_head: there is no need to touch it
      at all.
      
      It adds a big comment explaining why we are doing this nasty thing.
      9f49f9f3
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] 6PACK asumes HZ=100 · 74b0ab1b
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Hans-Joachim Hetscher <me@privacy.net>
      
      the Hamradio 6pack driver wasn't modified to work with the 1000 HZ
      internal kernel timebase.
      74b0ab1b
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] soundcard.c devfs fix · 6107a647
      Andrew Morton authored
      It is using "snd".  It should be using "sound".
      6107a647
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] fix alloc_bootmem_low_pages · 7821370f
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: jbarnes@sgi.com (Jesse Barnes)
      
      This patch is needed for some discontig boxes since the memory maps may
      be built out-of-order.
      7821370f
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] ext3: don't start a commit in write_super() · 9f280843
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: bzzz@tmi.comex.ru
      
      Now we have sync_fs(), the kludge of using write_super() to detect when the
      VFS is trying to sync the fs is unneeded.
      
      With this change we don't accidentally run commits in response to kupdate
      and bdflush activity and it speedup up some heavy workloads significantly.
      9f280843
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] Fix race in ext3_getblk · 77b070cb
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Alex Tomas <bzzz@tmi.comex.ru>
      
      ext3_getblk() memsets a newly allocated buffer, but forgets to check
      whether a different thread brought it uptodate while we waited for the
      buffer lock.
      
      It's OK normally because we're serialised by the page lock.  But lustre
      apparently is doing something different with getblk and hits this race.
      
      Plus I suspect it's racy with competing O_DIRECT writes.
      77b070cb
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] ext3: avoid reading empty inode blocks · bca17d03
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Alex Tomas <bzzz@tmi.comex.ru>
      
      ext3_get_inode_loc() read inode's block only if:
      
        1) this inode has no copy in memory
        2) inode's block has another valid inode(s)
      
      this optimization allows to avoid needless I/O in two cases:
      
      1) just allocated inode is first valid in the inode's block
      
      2) kernel wants to write inode, but buffer in which inode
         belongs to gets freed by VM
      bca17d03
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] rework readahead for congested queues · 12affe8f
      Andrew Morton authored
      Since Jens changed the block layer to fail readahead if the queue has no
      requests free, a few changes suggest themselves.
      
      - It's a bit silly to go and alocate a bunch of pages, build BIOs for them,
        submit the IO only to have it fail, forcing us to free the pages again.
      
        So the patch changes do_page_cache_readahead() to peek at the queue's
        read_congested state.  If the queue is read-congested we abandon the entire
        readahead up-front without doing all that work.
      
      - If the queue is not read-congested, we go ahead and do the readahead,
        after having set PF_READAHEAD.
      
        The backing_dev_info's read-congested threshold cuts in when 7/8ths of
        the queue's requests are in flight, so it is probable that the readahead
        abandonment code in __make_request will now almost never trigger.
      
      - The above changes make do_page_cache_readahead() "unreliable", in that it
        may do nothing at all.
      
        However there are some system calls:
      
      	- fadvise(POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED)
      	- madvise(MADV_WILLNEED)
      	- sys_readahead()
      
        In which the user has an expectation that the kernel will actually
        perform the IO.
      
        So the patch creates a new "force_page_cache_readahead()" which will
        perform the IO regardless of the queue's congestion state.
      
        Arguably, this is the wrong thing to do: even though the application
        requested readahead it could be that the kernel _should_ abandon the user's
        request because the disk is so busy.
      
        I don't know.  But for now, let's keep the above syscalls behaviour
        unchanged.  It is trivial to switch back to do_page_cache_readahead()
        later.
      12affe8f
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] fix bogus IO error messages · d49ceaba
      Andrew Morton authored
      Since Jens added the pagecache readahead support in the block layer we've
      been getting bogus IO error messages from buffer.c due to __make_request
      calling end_io against a non-uptodate buffer.
      
      We can just use PF_READAHEAD to shut that up.  But really, we shouldn't even
      have allocated all those pages and submittted the readahead IO if the queue
      was congested.   We have the infrastructure to do that now.
      d49ceaba
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] Fix vmtruncate race and distributed filesystem race · 3e63f0be
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Dave McCracken <dmccr@us.ibm.com>
      
      This patch solves the race between truncate and page in which can cause stray
      anon pages to appear in the truncated region.
      
      The race occurs when a process is sleeping in pagein IO during the truncate:
      there's a window after checking i_size in which the paging-in process decides
      that the page was an OK one.
      
      This leaves an anon page in the pagetables, and if the file is subsequently
      extended we have an anon page floating about inside a file-backed mmap - user
      modifications will not be written out.
      
      Apparently this is also needed for the implementation of POSIX semantics for
      distributed filesystems.
      
      We use a generation counter in the address_space so the paging-in process can
      determine whether there was a truncate which might have shot the new page
      down.
      
      It's a bit grubby to be playing with files and inodes in do_no_page(), but we
      do need the page_table_lock coverage for this, and rearranging thngs to
      provide that coverage to filemap_nopage wasn't very nice either.
      3e63f0be
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] Interface to invalidate regions of mmaps · 5096494f
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com>
      
      The patch reworks and generalises vmtruncate_list() a bit to create an API
      which invalidates a specified portion of an address_space, permitting
      distributed filesystems to maintain POSIX semantics when a file mmap()ed on
      one client is modified on another client.
      5096494f
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] unlock_buffer() needs a barrier · 6e20adb2
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>
      
      unlock_buffer() needs a barrier before the waitqueue_active() optimisation.
      6e20adb2
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] kwsapd can free too much memory · f76a4338
      Andrew Morton authored
      We need to subtract the number of freed slab pages from the number of pages
      to free, not add it.
      f76a4338
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] non-MII 3c59x fix · 6f3a72d6
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Marc Zyngier <mzyngier@freesurf.fr>
      
      The following patch tries to fix a small bug that crept in at some
      point during 2.5.
      
      None of my 3c592 or 3c597 would work if I didn't force media
      type. Instead, it would try to probe MII, looking for a suitable
      transceiver, and finaly give up, because these cards really do not
      have any sort of MII... :
      
        EISA: Probing bus 0 at Intel Corp. 82375EB
        EISA: Mainboard DEC5000 detected.
        EISA: slot 2 : ADP0001 detected.
        EISA: slot 3 : ADP7771 detected.
        EISA: slot 4 : DPTA401 detected.
        EISA: slot 5 : TCM5920 detected.
        3c59x: Donald Becker and others. www.scyld.com/network/vortex.html
        00:05: 3Com EISA 3c592 EISA 10Mbps Demon/Vortex at 0x5000. Vers LK1.1.19
          ***WARNING*** No MII transceivers found!
        EISA: Detected 4 cards.
      
      With the enclosed patch, it just works, at least on my setup (3c592 on
      Alpha, and 3c597 on x86). I haven't been able to test it didn't break
      cards with MII, because I do not have such cards in my test boxes...
      
      The patch also removes two useless EISA-only #define I introduced some
      time ago.
      6f3a72d6
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] dev_t printing · 482a9473
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
      
      Different architectures use different types for dev_t, so it is hard to
      print dev_t variables out correctly.  Quite a lot of code is wrong now, and
      will continue to be wrong when 64-bit dev_t is merged.
      
      Greg's patch introduces a little wrapper function which can be used to
      safely form a dev_t for printing.  I added the format_dev_t function as
      well, which is needed for direct insertion in a printk statement.
      482a9473
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] 3c59x suspend/resume fix · 81e99e7f
      Andrew Morton authored
      Currently, all of the 3c59x power management code is disabled unless the
      `enable_wol' module parameter is provided.  This was done because the PM
      support was added quite late in the 2.4 cycle.
      
      It was always intended that this conditionality be removed in 2.5.
      81e99e7f
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] update to speedstep-centrino.c · 1a14aeea
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
      
      The 900MHz Pentium M has two spaces before the frequency:
      "Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor  900MHz"
      
      This patch adds a 2nd CPU macro (_CPU) which also takes the
      stringified speed so that extra spacing can be added.
      1a14aeea
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] buffer.c debugging · e6238ac5
      Andrew Morton authored
      We get a bug report about once per month wherein find_get_block_slow() spits
      an error message.  For some reason we have buffers against a blockdev page
      which have the incorrect b_size.
      
      Probably, an earlier set_blcoksize() failed to invalidate all the apges for
      some reason.  I just don't know.
      
      The patch adds a bit of extra debug info to aid in diagnosing this.
      e6238ac5
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] re-slabify i386 pgd's and pmd's · 6beadb3b
      Andrew Morton authored
      From: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
      
      The original pgd/pmd slabification patches had a critical bug on
      non-PAE where both modifications of pgd entries to remove pagetables
      attached for non-PSE mappings back to a PSE state and modifications of
      pgd entries to attach pagetables to bring PSE mappings into a non-PSE
      state were not propagated to cached pgd's. PAE was immune to it owing
      to the shared kernel pmd.
      
      The following patch vs. 2.5.69 restores the slabification done to cache
      preconstructed pagetables with the proper propagation of conversions
      to and from PSE mappings to cached pgd's for the non-PAE case.
      
      This is an optimization to reduce the bitblitting overhead for spawning
      small tasks (for larger ones, bottom-level pagetable copies dominate)
      primarily on non-PAE; the PAE code change is largely to remove #ifdefs
      and to treat the two cases uniformly, though some positive but small
      performance improvement has been observed for PAE in one of mbligh's
      posts. The non-PAE performance improvement has been observed on a box
      running a script-heavy end-user workload as a large long-term profile
      hit count reduction for pgd_alloc() and relatives thereof.
      
      I would very much appreciate outside testers. Even though I've been
      able to verify this boots and runs properly and survives several cycles
      of restarting X on my non-PAE Thinkpad T21, that environment has never
      been able to reproduce the bug. Those with the proper graphics hardware
      to prod the affected codepaths into action are the ones best suited to
      verify proper functionality. There is also some locking introduced; if
      some performance verification on non-PAE SMP i386 targets (my SMP
      targets unfortunately all require PAE due to arch code dependencies)
      that also have the proper hardware could be done, that would help
      determine whether alternative locking schemes that competed against
      the one shown here are preferable (in particular, the ticket-based
      scheme mentioned in the comments).
      6beadb3b
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] selinux merge · 7bbf0e05
      Andrew Morton authored
      From Stephen Smalley <sds@epoch.ncsc.mil>
      
      This has been in -mm for a few weeks and James Morris has been
      regression testing each release.
      7bbf0e05
    • Andrew Morton's avatar
      [PATCH] misc fixes · ad55c575
      Andrew Morton authored
      - remove unneeded loglevel manipulation in journal_dirty_metadata()
      
      - remove crud which was acidentally added to blkmtd.c
      
      - remove unused vars in mxser.c (Vinay K Nallamothu <vinay-rc@naturesoft.net>)
      
      - PF_LESS_THROTTLE was using the wrong bit (Joe Korty <joe.korty@ccur.com>)
      
      - unused var in cyclades.c ("Krishnakumar. R" <krishnakumar@naturesoft.net>)
      ad55c575
  2. 31 Jul, 2003 16 commits