Re: fadvise DONTNEED implementation (or lack thereof)

[Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 11/17/2010 09:47 PM, Minchan Kim wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 1:22 AM, Rik van Riel<riel@redhat.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 11/17/2010 05:16 AM, Minchan Kim wrote:
>>>
>>>> Absolutely. But how about rsync's two touch?
>>>> It can evict working set.
>>>>
>>>> I need the time for investigation.
>>>> Thanks for the comment.
>>>
>>> Maybe we could exempt MADV_SEQUENTIAL and FADV_SEQUENTIAL
>>> touches from promoting the page to the active list?
>>>
>>
>> The problem is non-mapped file page.
>> non-mapped file page promotion happens by only mark_page_accessed.
>> But it doesn't enough information to prevent promotion(ex, vma or file)
>
> I believe we have enough information in filemap.c and can just
> pass that as a parameter to mark_page_accessed.

FADV_SEQUENTIAL is per file/vma semantic and It is used by many place.
I think changing all those places isn't simple and I don't want to add
new structure to propagate the information to mark_page_accessed.

>
>> Here is another idea.
>> Current problem is following as.
>> User can use fadivse with FADV_DONTNEED.
>> But problem is that it can't affect when it meet dirty pages.
>> So user have to sync dirty page before calling fadvise with FADV_DONTNEED.
>> It would lose performance.
>>
>> Let's add some semantic of FADV_DONTNEED.
>> It invalidates only pages which are not dirty.
>> If it meets dirty page, let's move the page into inactive's tail or head