Unevictable LRU Infrastructure
authorLee Schermerhorn <Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com>
Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:26:39 +0000 (20:26 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:50:26 +0000 (08:50 -0700)
commit894bc310419ac95f4fa4142dc364401a7e607f65
tree15d56a7333b41620016b845d2323dd06e822b621
parent8a7a8544a4f6554ec2d8048ac9f9672f442db5a2
Unevictable LRU Infrastructure

When the system contains lots of mlocked or otherwise unevictable pages,
the pageout code (kswapd) can spend lots of time scanning over these
pages.  Worse still, the presence of lots of unevictable pages can confuse
kswapd into thinking that more aggressive pageout modes are required,
resulting in all kinds of bad behaviour.

Infrastructure to manage pages excluded from reclaim--i.e., hidden from
vmscan.  Based on a patch by Larry Woodman of Red Hat.  Reworked to
maintain "unevictable" pages on a separate per-zone LRU list, to "hide"
them from vmscan.

Kosaki Motohiro added the support for the memory controller unevictable
lru list.

Pages on the unevictable list have both PG_unevictable and PG_lru set.
Thus, PG_unevictable is analogous to and mutually exclusive with
PG_active--it specifies which LRU list the page is on.

The unevictable infrastructure is enabled by a new mm Kconfig option
[CONFIG_]UNEVICTABLE_LRU.

A new function 'page_evictable(page, vma)' in vmscan.c tests whether or
not a page may be evictable.  Subsequent patches will add the various
!evictable tests.  We'll want to keep these tests light-weight for use in
shrink_active_list() and, possibly, the fault path.

To avoid races between tasks putting pages [back] onto an LRU list and
tasks that might be moving the page from non-evictable to evictable state,
the new function 'putback_lru_page()' -- inverse to 'isolate_lru_page()'
-- tests the "evictability" of a page after placing it on the LRU, before
dropping the reference.  If the page has become unevictable,
putback_lru_page() will redo the 'putback', thus moving the page to the
unevictable list.  This way, we avoid "stranding" evictable pages on the
unevictable list.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix fallout from out-of-order merge]
[riel@redhat.com: fix UNEVICTABLE_LRU and !PROC_PAGE_MONITOR build]
[nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp: remove redundant mapping check]
[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: unevictable-lru-infrastructure: putback_lru_page()/unevictable page handling rework]
[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: kill unnecessary lock_page() in vmscan.c]
[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: revert migration change of unevictable lru infrastructure]
[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: revert to unevictable-lru-infrastructure-kconfig-fix.patch]
[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: restore patch failure of vmstat-unevictable-and-mlocked-pages-vm-events.patch]
Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Debugged-by: Benjamin Kidwell <benjkidwell@yahoo.com>
Signed-off-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
13 files changed:
include/linux/memcontrol.h
include/linux/mm_inline.h
include/linux/mmzone.h
include/linux/page-flags.h
include/linux/pagevec.h
include/linux/swap.h
mm/Kconfig
mm/internal.h
mm/memcontrol.c
mm/mempolicy.c
mm/migrate.c
mm/swap.c
mm/vmscan.c