Re: 2.6.6-rc{1,2} bad VM/NFS interaction in case of dirty page writeback

Shantanu Goel
2004-04-27T11:44:39Z

--- Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> wrote:
> Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Err... Anything that currently ends up calling
> writepage() and returning
> > WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE. This is a problem that you
> believe you are seeing
> > the effects of, right?
>
> I didn't report the problem - Shantanu is reporting
> problems where all the
> NFS pages are stuck on the active list and the VM
> has nothing to reclaim on
> the inactive list.
>

Yup, what happens is the NFS writepage() returns
WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE causing the scanner to place the
page at the head of the active list. Now the page
won't be reclaimed until the scanner has run through
the entire active list. I do not see such behaviour
with ext3 for instance.

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