• Andrew Morton's avatar
    [PATCH] buffer_head takedown for bighighmem machines · e182d612
    Andrew Morton authored
    This patch addresses the excessive consumption of ZONE_NORMAL by
    buffer_heads on highmem machines.  The algorithms which decide which
    buffers to shoot down are fairly dumb, but they only cut in on machines
    with large highmem:lowmem ratios and the code footprint is tiny.
    
    The buffer.c change implements the buffer_head accounting - it sets the
    upper limit on buffer_head memory occupancy to 10% of ZONE_NORMAL.
    
    A possible side-effect of this change is that the kernel will perform
    more calls to get_block() to map pages to disk.  This will only be
    observed when a file is being repeatadly overwritten - this is the only
    case in which the "cached get_block result" in the buffers is useful.
    
    I did quite some testing of this back in the delalloc ext2 days, and
    was not able to come up with a test in which the cached get_block
    result was measurably useful.  That's for ext2, which has a fast
    get_block().
    
    A desirable side effect of this patch is that the kernel will be able
    to cache much more blockdev pagecache in ZONE_NORMAL, so there are more
    ext2/3 indirect blocks in cache, so with some workloads, less I/O will
    be performed.
    
    In mpage_writepage(): if the number of buffer_heads is excessive then
    buffers are stripped from pages as they are submitted for writeback.
    This change is only useful for filesystems which are using the mpage
    code.  That's ext2 and ext3-writeback and JFS.  An mpage patch for
    reiserfs was floating about but seems to have got lost.
    
    There is no need to strip buffers for reads because the mpage code does
    not attach buffers for reads.
    
    These are perhaps not the most appropriate buffer_heads to toss away.
    Perhaps something smarter should be done to detect file overwriting, or
    to toss the 'oldest' buffer_heads first.
    
    In refill_inactive(): if the number of buffer_heads is excessive then
    strip buffers from pages as they move onto the inactive list.  This
    change is useful for all filesystems.  This approach is good because
    pages which are being repeatedly overwritten will remain on the active
    list and will retain their buffers, whereas pages which are not being
    overwritten will be stripped.
    e182d612
vmscan.c 18.5 KB