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From: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: npiggin@kernel.dk, Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>,
	David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>,
	linux-mm@kvack.org, Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Subject: Re: vmscan: Do not run shrinkers for zones other than ZONE_NORMAL
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:03:32 -0500 (CDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.1010211455100.30295@router.home> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20101021124054.14b85e50.akpm@linux-foundation.org>

On Thu, 21 Oct 2010, Andrew Morton wrote:

> The patch doesn't patch direct reclaim, in do_try_to_free_pages().  How
> come?

Direct reclaim does not run node specific shrink_slab. Direct reclaim does
a general pass after the individual zones have been shrunk.

> OK, maybe this.  Suppose we have a machine with 800M lowmem and 200M
> highmem.  And suppose the lowmem region is stuffed full of clean
> icache/dcache.  A __GFP_HIGHMEM allocation should put pressure on
> lowmem to get some of those pages back.  What we don't want to do is to
> keep on reclaiming the highmem zone and allocating pages from there,
> because the machine would effectively end up with only 200M available
> for pagecache.

Shrinker reclaim is not zone specific. It either occurs on a node or on
the system as a whole. A failure of HIGHMEM allocation in the direct
reclaim path will result in shrinkers being called with NO_NUMA_NODE and
therefore global reclaim will take place everywhere.

Per node reclaim occurs from kswapd and covers all zones of that node.

> Please convince us that your patch doesn't screw up zone balancing?

There are no slab allocations in HIGHMEM or MOVABLE. Nothing to balance
there.

That reminds me: We also have counters on how many slabs exist in a given
zone these days. We could check for zero there and just not run the
shrinkers if zero. We could also use those counters to guide shrink_slab
in a better way.

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  reply	other threads:[~2010-10-21 20:03 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 45+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-10-21 17:59 Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 18:00 ` shrinkers: Add node to indicate where to target shrinking Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 18:12   ` Andi Kleen
2010-10-21 20:57   ` David Rientjes
2010-10-21 21:07     ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-22 13:27     ` Andi Kleen
2010-10-21 23:58   ` Nick Piggin
2010-10-22 12:12     ` Andi Kleen
2010-10-22 15:55     ` Christoph Hellwig
2010-10-22 16:32       ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-24  1:42         ` Nick Piggin
2010-10-25  0:57           ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-10-25 14:59           ` Christoph Lameter
2010-11-09  4:03             ` Nick Piggin
2010-10-22 16:46       ` Andi Kleen
2010-10-24  1:31       ` Nick Piggin
2010-11-14  2:26   ` Michel Lespinasse
2010-11-14  7:10     ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-11-14 11:05       ` Michel Lespinasse
2010-11-15  0:29         ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-10-21 18:13 ` vmscan: Do not run shrinkers for zones other than ZONE_NORMAL Andi Kleen
2010-10-21 18:22   ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 18:27   ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 18:33     ` Andi Kleen
2010-10-21 20:48     ` David Rientjes
2010-10-21 20:54       ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 19:40 ` Andrew Morton
2010-10-21 20:03   ` Christoph Lameter [this message]
2010-10-21 20:14     ` Andrew Morton
2010-10-21 20:28       ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 20:36         ` Andrew Morton
2010-10-21 20:49           ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 20:59             ` Andrew Morton
2010-10-21 21:13               ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 21:21                 ` Andrew Morton
2010-10-21 23:04                   ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-21 23:56 ` Nick Piggin
2010-10-22  1:37 ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-10-22 14:06   ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-24  1:37     ` Nick Piggin
2010-10-25  1:22     ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-10-25 15:07       ` Christoph Lameter
2010-10-26  2:52         ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-10-26 12:42           ` KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-10-26 13:10           ` Christoph Lameter

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