writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasks
authorWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Tue, 5 Apr 2011 19:21:19 +0000 (13:21 -0600)
committerWu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Sun, 18 Dec 2011 06:20:20 +0000 (14:20 +0800)
commit54848d73f9f254631303d6eab9b976855988b266
tree9fb4b7e564f2c0df88d0bde2f482b9b7efc847fa
parent1bc36b6426ae49139e9f56491db76b95921454d7
writeback: charge leaked page dirties to active tasks

It's a years long problem that a large number of short-lived dirtiers
(eg. gcc instances in a fast kernel build) may starve long-run dirtiers
(eg. dd) as well as pushing the dirty pages to the global hard limit.

The solution is to charge the pages dirtied by the exited gcc to the
other random dirtying tasks. It sounds not perfect, however should
behave good enough in practice, seeing as that throttled tasks aren't
actually running so those that are running are more likely to pick it up
and get throttled, therefore promoting an equal spread.

Randy: fix compile error: 'dirty_throttle_leaks' undeclared in exit.c

Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
include/linux/writeback.h
kernel/exit.c
mm/page-writeback.c