• Andrew Morton's avatar
    [PATCH] handle zones which are full of unreclaimable pages · 36fb7f84
    Andrew Morton authored
    This patch is a general solution to the situation where a zone is full
    of pinned pages.
    
    This can come about if:
    
    a) Someone has allocated all of ZONE_DMA for IO buffers
    
    b) Some application is mlocking some memory and a zone ends up full
       of mlocked pages (can happen on a 1G ia32 system)
    
    c) All of ZONE_HIGHMEM is pinned in hugetlb pages (can happen on 1G
       machines)
    
    We'll currently burn 10% of CPU in kswapd when this happens, although
    it is quite hard to trigger.
    
    The algorithm is:
    
    - If page reclaim has scanned 2 * the total number of pages in the
      zone and there have been no pages freed in that zone then mark the
      zone as "all unreclaimable".
    
    - When a zone is "all unreclaimable" page reclaim almost ignores it.
      We will perform a "light" scan at DEF_PRIORITY (typically 1/4096'th of
      the zone, or 64 pages) and then forget about the zone.
    
    - When a batch of pages are freed into the zone, clear its "all
      unreclaimable" state and start full scanning again.  The assumption
      being that some state change has come about which will make reclaim
      successful again.
    
      So if a "light scan" actually frees some pages, the zone will revert to
      normal state immediately.
    
    So we're effectively putting the zone into "low power" mode, and lightly
    polling it to see if something has changed.
    
    The code works OK, but is quite hard to test - I mainly tested it by
    pinning all highmem in hugetlb pages.
    36fb7f84
page_alloc.c 34.1 KB