Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752488AbbEFJ2T (ORCPT ); Wed, 6 May 2015 05:28:19 -0400 Received: from cantor2.suse.de ([195.135.220.15]:42128 "EHLO mx2.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751330AbbEFJ2Q (ORCPT ); Wed, 6 May 2015 05:28:16 -0400 Message-ID: <5549DEAC.6080709@suse.cz> Date: Wed, 06 May 2015 11:28:12 +0200 From: Vlastimil Babka User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 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 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: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1528 Lines: 35 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 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/