[PATCH 2/2] vmscan: take at least one pass with shrinkers

Glauber Costa
2012-12-19T08:40:18Z

In very low free kernel memory situations, it may be the case that we
have less objects to free than our initial batch size. If this is the
case, it is better to shrink those, and open space for the new workload
then to keep them and fail the new allocations.

More specifically, this happens because we encode this in a loop with
the condition: "while (total_scan >= batch_size)". So if we are in such
a case, we'll not even enter the loop.

This patch modifies turns it into a do () while {} loop, that will
guarantee that we scan it at least once, while keeping the behaviour
exactly the same for the cases in which total_scan > batch_size.

Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
CC: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
CC: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
CC: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
---
mm/vmscan.c | 4 ++--
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 7f30961..fcd1aa0 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -280,7 +280,7 @@ unsigned long shrink_slab(struct shrink_control *shrink,
nr_pages_scanned, lru_pages,
max_pass, delta, total_scan);

- while (total_scan >= batch_size) {
+ do {
int nr_before;

nr_before = do_shrinker_shrink(shrinker, shrink, 0);
@@ -294,7 +294,7 @@ unsigned long shrink_slab(struct shrink_control *shrink,
total_scan -= batch_size;

cond_resched();
- }
+ } while (total_scan >= batch_size);

/*
* move the unused scan count back into the shrinker in a