From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <46EFE3AE.9040909@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:41:50 -0400 From: Rik van Riel MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: VM/VFS bug with large amount of memory and file systems? References: <200709170828.01098.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> <46EEB3AC.20205@redhat.com> <200709180312.31937.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> In-Reply-To: <200709180312.31937.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Nick Piggin Cc: Anton Altaparmakov , Andrew Morton , Peter Zijlstra , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Linux Memory Management List , marc.smith@esmail.mcc.edu List-ID: Nick Piggin wrote: > On Tuesday 18 September 2007 03:04, Rik van Riel wrote: >> Nick Piggin wrote: >>> (Rik has a patch sitting in -mm I believe which would make this problem >>> even worse, by doing even less highmem scanning in response to lowmem >>> allocations). >> My patch should not make any difference here, since >> balance_pgdat() already scans the zones from high to >> low and sets an end_zone variable that determines the >> highest zone to scan. >> >> All my patch does is make sure that we do not try to >> reclaim excessive amounts of dma or low memory when >> a higher zone is full. > > Sorry, yeah I had it the wrong way around. Your patch would not > increase the probability of this problem. > > We could have some logic in there to scan highmem when buffer > heads are over limit. But that really kind of sucks in that it introduces > some arbitrary point where reclaim behaviour completely changes... > Adding a shrinker for buffer heads is the "logical" approach Christoph Lameter's slab defragmenting patch set does this. One reason Andrew has not merged that code yet is a lack of reviewers, so I am going through it with a fine comb and hope to have the patches reviewed by the end of today. Lets get this bug fixed the right way. -- Politics is the struggle between those who want to make their country the best in the world, and those who believe it already is. Each group calls the other unpatriotic. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org