Re: [RFC 2/9] Use NOMEMALLOC reclaim to allow reclaim if PF_MEMALLOC is set

Christoph Lameter
2007-08-20T20:32:53Z

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> > Plus the same issue can happen today. Writes are usually not completed
> > during reclaim. If the writes are sufficiently deferred then you have the
> > same issue now.
>
> Once we have initiated (disk) writeout we do not need more memory to
> complete it, all we need to do is wait for the completion interrupt.

We cannot reclaim the page as long as the I/O is not complete. If you
have too many anonymous pages and the rest of memory is dirty then you can
get into OOM scenarios even without this patch.

> Networking is different here in that an unbounded amount of net traffic
> needs to be processed in order to find the completion event.

Its not that different. Pages are pinned during writeout from reclaim and
it is not clear when the write will complete. There are no bounds that I
know in reclaim for the writeback of dirty anonymous pages.

But some throttling function like for dirty pages is likely needed for
network traffic.