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| author | Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au> | 2002-04-14 23:29:22 -0700 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Linus Torvalds <torvalds@penguin.transmeta.com> | 2002-04-14 23:29:22 -0700 |
| commit | 49c7ca7c5b721db65583876e0c11f1316eecd397 (patch) | |
| tree | 2894118c243874043daa4e0c7d0999788ddfa03e /include/linux | |
| parent | de6ca58cca1a0b2452321cdbdec0dead70dbf5b5 (diff) | |
[PATCH] don't allocate ratnodes under PF_MEMALLOC
On the swap_out() path, the radix-tree pagecache is allocating its
nodes with PF_MEMALLOC set, which allows it to completely exhaust the
free page lists(*). This is fairly easy to trigger with swap-intensive
loads.
It would be better to make those node allocations fail at an earlier
time. When this happens, the radix-tree can still obtain nodes from its
mempool, and we leave some memory available for the I/O layer.
(Assuming that the I/O is being performed under PF_MEMALLOC, which it
is).
So the patch simply drops PF_MEMALLOC while adding nodes to the
swapcache's tree.
We're still performing atomic allocations, so the rat is still biting
pretty deeply into the page reserves - under heavy load the amount of
free memory is less than half of what it was pre-rat.
It is unfortunate that the page allocator overloads !__GFP_WAIT to also
mean "try harder". It would be better to separate these concepts, and
to allow the radix-tree code (at least) to perform atomic allocations,
but to not go below pages_min. It seems that __GFP_TRY_HARDER will be
pretty straightforward to implement. Later.
The patch also impements a workaround for the mempool list_head
problem, until that is sorted out.
(*) The usual result is that the SCSI layer dies at scsi_merge.c:82.
It would be nice to have a fix for that - it's going BUG if 1-order
allocations fail at interrupt time. That happens pretty easily.
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions
