From 439423f6894aa0dec22187526827456f5004baed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Shaohua Li Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:59:12 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] vmscan: clear ZONE_CONGESTED for zone with good watermark ZONE_CONGESTED is only cleared in kswapd, but pages can be freed in any task. It's possible ZONE_CONGESTED isn't cleared in some cases: 1. the zone is already balanced just entering balance_pgdat() for order-0 because concurrent tasks free memory. In this case, later check will skip the zone as it's balanced so the flag isn't cleared. 2. high order balance fallbacks to order-0. quote from Mel: At the end of balance_pgdat(), kswapd uses the following logic; If reclaiming at high order { for each zone { if all_unreclaimable skip if watermark is not met order = 0 loop again /* watermark is met */ clear congested } } i.e. it clears ZONE_CONGESTED if it the zone is balanced. if not, it restarts balancing at order-0. However, if the higher zones are balanced for order-0, kswapd will miss clearing ZONE_CONGESTED as that only happens after a zone is shrunk. This can mean that wait_iff_congested() stalls unnecessarily. This patch makes kswapd clear ZONE_CONGESTED during its initial highmem->dma scan for zones that are already balanced. Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li Acked-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/vmscan.c | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index 22631e0994b3..b7719ec10dc5 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -2529,6 +2529,9 @@ loop_again: high_wmark_pages(zone), 0, 0)) { end_zone = i; break; + } else { + /* If balanced, clear the congested flag */ + zone_clear_flag(zone, ZONE_CONGESTED); } } if (i < 0) -- 2.20.1