mm, vmscan: clear PGDAT_WRITEBACK when zone is balanced
authorMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Fri, 24 Feb 2017 22:59:07 +0000 (14:59 -0800)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Sat, 25 Feb 2017 01:46:55 +0000 (17:46 -0800)
commitc2f83143f1c67d186520b72b6cefbf0aa07a34ee
tree91e1437faa00f552fb68c1c339c9d4f446b2ac01
parent8f526e12426e284b7d5d659b6b2e8920fa7c9ed9
mm, vmscan: clear PGDAT_WRITEBACK when zone is balanced

Hillf Danton pointed out that since commit 1d82de618dd ("mm, vmscan:
make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes") that PGDAT_WRITEBACK is no
longer cleared.

It was not noticed as triggering it requires pages under writeback to
cycle twice through the LRU and before kswapd gets stalled.
Historically, such issues tended to occur on small machines writing
heavily to slow storage such as a USB stick.

Once kswapd stalls, direct reclaim stalls may be higher but due to the
fact that memory pressure is required, it would not be very noticable.

Michal Hocko suggested removing the flag entirely but the conservative
fix is to restore the intended PGDAT_WRITEBACK behaviour and clear the
flag when a suitable zone is balanced.

Fixes: 1d82de618ddd ("mm, vmscan: make kswapd reclaim in terms of nodes")
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170203203222.gq7hk66yc36lpgtb@suse.de
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/vmscan.c