From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-wi0-f169.google.com (mail-wi0-f169.google.com [209.85.212.169]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4218F6B0038 for ; Wed, 6 May 2015 05:28:17 -0400 (EDT) Received: by wizk4 with SMTP id k4so194387957wiz.1 for ; Wed, 06 May 2015 02:28:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mx2.suse.de (cantor2.suse.de. [195.135.220.15]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id mb19si1240882wic.69.2015.05.06.02.28.15 for (version=TLSv1 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA bits=128/128); Wed, 06 May 2015 02:28:15 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <5549DEAC.6080709@suse.cz> Date: Wed, 06 May 2015 11:28:12 +0200 From: Vlastimil Babka MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] mm: vmscan: do not throttle based on pfmemalloc reserves if node has no reclaimable pages References: <20150327192850.GA18701@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <5515BAF7.6070604@intel.com> <20150327222350.GA22887@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <20150331094829.GE9589@dhcp22.suse.cz> <551E47EF.5030800@suse.cz> <20150403174556.GF32318@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <20150505220913.GC32719@linux.vnet.ibm.com> In-Reply-To: <20150505220913.GC32719@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Nishanth Aravamudan Cc: Michal Hocko , Dave Hansen , Mel Gorman , anton@sambar.org, linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , Johannes Weiner , Rik van Riel , Dan Streetman On 05/06/2015 12:09 AM, Nishanth Aravamudan wrote: > On 03.04.2015 [10:45:56 -0700], Nishanth Aravamudan wrote: >>> What I find somewhat worrying though is that we could potentially >>> break the pfmemalloc_watermark_ok() test in situations where >>> zone_reclaimable_pages(zone) == 0 is a transient situation (and not >>> a permanently allocated hugepage). In that case, the throttling is >>> supposed to help system recover, and we might be breaking that >>> ability with this patch, no? >> >> Well, if it's transient, we'll skip it this time through, and once there >> are reclaimable pages, we should notice it again. >> >> I'm not familiar enough with this logic, so I'll read through the code >> again soon to see if your concern is valid, as best I can. > > In reviewing the code, I think that transiently unreclaimable zones will > lead to some higher direct reclaim rates and possible contention, but > shouldn't cause any major harm. The likelihood of that situation, as > well, in a non-reserved memory setup like the one I described, seems > exceedingly low. OK, I guess when a reasonably configured system has nothing to reclaim, it's already busted and throttling won't change much. Consider the patch Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka > Thanks, > Nish > -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org