Commit a804552b9a15c931cfc2a92a2e0aed1add8b580a

Authored by Johannes Weiner
Committed by Linus Torvalds
1 parent 8582cb96b0

mm/page-writeback.c: fix dirty_balance_reserve subtraction from dirtyable memory

Tejun reported stuttering and latency spikes on a system where random
tasks would enter direct reclaim and get stuck on dirty pages.  Around
50% of memory was occupied by tmpfs backed by an SSD, and another disk
(rotating) was reading and writing at max speed to shrink a partition.

: The problem was pretty ridiculous.  It's a 8gig machine w/ one ssd and 10k
: rpm harddrive and I could reliably reproduce constant stuttering every
: several seconds for as long as buffered IO was going on on the hard drive
: either with tmpfs occupying somewhere above 4gig or a test program which
: allocates about the same amount of anon memory.  Although swap usage was
: zero, turning off swap also made the problem go away too.
:
: The trigger conditions seem quite plausible - high anon memory usage w/
: heavy buffered IO and swap configured - and it's highly likely that this
: is happening in the wild too.  (this can happen with copying large files
: to usb sticks too, right?)

This patch (of 2):

The dirty_balance_reserve is an approximation of the fraction of free
pages that the page allocator does not make available for page cache
allocations.  As a result, it has to be taken into account when
calculating the amount of "dirtyable memory", the baseline to which
dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio are applied.

However, currently the reserve is subtracted from the sum of free and
reclaimable pages, which is non-sensical and leads to erroneous results
when the system is dominated by unreclaimable pages and the
dirty_balance_reserve is bigger than free+reclaimable.  In that case, at
least the already allocated cache should be considered dirtyable.

Fix the calculation by subtracting the reserve from the amount of free
pages, then adding the reclaimable pages on top.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix CONFIG_HIGHMEM build]
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reported-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

Showing 1 changed file with 24 additions and 31 deletions Side-by-side Diff

... ... @@ -191,6 +191,25 @@
191 191 * global dirtyable memory first.
192 192 */
193 193  
  194 +/**
  195 + * zone_dirtyable_memory - number of dirtyable pages in a zone
  196 + * @zone: the zone
  197 + *
  198 + * Returns the zone's number of pages potentially available for dirty
  199 + * page cache. This is the base value for the per-zone dirty limits.
  200 + */
  201 +static unsigned long zone_dirtyable_memory(struct zone *zone)
  202 +{
  203 + unsigned long nr_pages;
  204 +
  205 + nr_pages = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES);
  206 + nr_pages -= min(nr_pages, zone->dirty_balance_reserve);
  207 +
  208 + nr_pages += zone_reclaimable_pages(zone);
  209 +
  210 + return nr_pages;
  211 +}
  212 +
194 213 static unsigned long highmem_dirtyable_memory(unsigned long total)
195 214 {
196 215 #ifdef CONFIG_HIGHMEM
197 216  
... ... @@ -198,11 +217,9 @@
198 217 unsigned long x = 0;
199 218  
200 219 for_each_node_state(node, N_HIGH_MEMORY) {
201   - struct zone *z =
202   - &NODE_DATA(node)->node_zones[ZONE_HIGHMEM];
  220 + struct zone *z = &NODE_DATA(node)->node_zones[ZONE_HIGHMEM];
203 221  
204   - x += zone_page_state(z, NR_FREE_PAGES) +
205   - zone_reclaimable_pages(z) - z->dirty_balance_reserve;
  222 + x += zone_dirtyable_memory(z);
206 223 }
207 224 /*
208 225 * Unreclaimable memory (kernel memory or anonymous memory
209 226  
... ... @@ -238,9 +255,11 @@
238 255 {
239 256 unsigned long x;
240 257  
241   - x = global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES) + global_reclaimable_pages();
  258 + x = global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES);
242 259 x -= min(x, dirty_balance_reserve);
243 260  
  261 + x += global_reclaimable_pages();
  262 +
244 263 if (!vm_highmem_is_dirtyable)
245 264 x -= highmem_dirtyable_memory(x);
246 265  
... ... @@ -286,32 +305,6 @@
286 305 *pbackground = background;
287 306 *pdirty = dirty;
288 307 trace_global_dirty_state(background, dirty);
289   -}
290   -
291   -/**
292   - * zone_dirtyable_memory - number of dirtyable pages in a zone
293   - * @zone: the zone
294   - *
295   - * Returns the zone's number of pages potentially available for dirty
296   - * page cache. This is the base value for the per-zone dirty limits.
297   - */
298   -static unsigned long zone_dirtyable_memory(struct zone *zone)
299   -{
300   - /*
301   - * The effective global number of dirtyable pages may exclude
302   - * highmem as a big-picture measure to keep the ratio between
303   - * dirty memory and lowmem reasonable.
304   - *
305   - * But this function is purely about the individual zone and a
306   - * highmem zone can hold its share of dirty pages, so we don't
307   - * care about vm_highmem_is_dirtyable here.
308   - */
309   - unsigned long nr_pages = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES) +
310   - zone_reclaimable_pages(zone);
311   -
312   - /* don't allow this to underflow */
313   - nr_pages -= min(nr_pages, zone->dirty_balance_reserve);
314   - return nr_pages;
315 308 }
316 309  
317 310 /**