Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1765274AbXHTUcx (ORCPT ); Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:32:53 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1764164AbXHTU1d (ORCPT ); Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:27:33 -0400 Received: from netops-testserver-4-out.sgi.com ([192.48.171.29]:51998 "EHLO relay.sgi.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1764517AbXHTU1c (ORCPT ); Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:27:32 -0400 Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:27:30 -0700 (PDT) From: Christoph Lameter X-X-Sender: clameter@schroedinger.engr.sgi.com To: Peter Zijlstra cc: Pavel Machek , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, dkegel@google.com, David Miller , Nick Piggin Subject: Re: [RFC 2/9] Use NOMEMALLOC reclaim to allow reclaim if PF_MEMALLOC is set In-Reply-To: <1187641056.5337.32.camel@lappy> Message-ID: References: <20070814153021.446917377@sgi.com> <20070814153501.305923060@sgi.com> <20070818071035.GA4667@ucw.cz> <1187641056.5337.32.camel@lappy> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1244 Lines: 29 On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > > Plus the same issue can happen today. Writes are usually not completed > > during reclaim. If the writes are sufficiently deferred then you have the > > same issue now. > > Once we have initiated (disk) writeout we do not need more memory to > complete it, all we need to do is wait for the completion interrupt. We cannot reclaim the page as long as the I/O is not complete. If you have too many anonymous pages and the rest of memory is dirty then you can get into OOM scenarios even without this patch. > Networking is different here in that an unbounded amount of net traffic > needs to be processed in order to find the completion event. Its not that different. Pages are pinned during writeout from reclaim and it is not clear when the write will complete. There are no bounds that I know in reclaim for the writeback of dirty anonymous pages. But some throttling function like for dirty pages is likely needed for network traffic. - 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/