Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752862Ab3HUUiJ (ORCPT ); Wed, 21 Aug 2013 16:38:09 -0400 Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:35422 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752512Ab3HUUiH (ORCPT ); Wed, 21 Aug 2013 16:38:07 -0400 Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 13:38:04 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Maxim Patlasov Cc: riel@redhat.com, jack@suse.cz, dev@parallels.com, miklos@szeredi.hu, fuse-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, xemul@parallels.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, jbottomley@parallels.com, linux-mm@kvack.org, viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, fengguang.wu@intel.com, devel@openvz.org, mgorman@suse.de Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: strictlimit feature -v4 Message-Id: <20130821133804.87ca602dd864df712e67342a@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <20130821135427.20334.79477.stgit@maximpc.sw.ru> References: <20130821135427.20334.79477.stgit@maximpc.sw.ru> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.2.0beta5 (GTK+ 2.24.10; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1433 Lines: 29 On Wed, 21 Aug 2013 17:56:32 +0400 Maxim Patlasov wrote: > The feature prevents mistrusted filesystems to grow a large number of dirty > pages before throttling. For such filesystems balance_dirty_pages always > check bdi counters against bdi limits. I.e. even if global "nr_dirty" is under > "freerun", it's not allowed to skip bdi checks. The only use case for now is > fuse: it sets bdi max_ratio to 1% by default and system administrators are > supposed to expect that this limit won't be exceeded. > > The feature is on if a BDI is marked by BDI_CAP_STRICTLIMIT flag. > A filesystem may set the flag when it initializes its BDI. Now I think about it, I don't really understand the need for this feature. Can you please go into some detail about the problematic scenarios and why they need fixing? Including an expanded descritopn of the term "mistrusted filesystem"? Is this some theoretical happens-in-the-lab thing, or are real world users actually hurting due to the lack of this feature? I think I'll apply it to -mm for now to get a bit of testing, but would very much like it if Fengguang could find time to review the implementation, please. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/