Re: [PATCH] remove throttle_vm_writeout()

John Stoffel
2007-10-05T15:43:32Z

>> I think that's an improvement in all respects.
>>
>> However it still does not generally address the deadlock scenario: if
>> there's a small DMA zone, and fuse manages to put all of those pages
>> under writeout, then there's trouble.

Miklos> And the only way to solve that AFAICS, is to make sure fuse
Miklos> never uses more than e.g. 50% of _any_ zone for page cache.
Miklos> And that may need some tweaking in the allocator...

So what happens if I have three different FUSE mounts, all under heavy
write pressure? It's not a FUSE problem, it's a VM problem as far as
I can see. All I did was extrapolate from the 50% number (where did
that come from?) and triple it to go over 100%, since we obviously
shouldn't take 100% of any zone, right?

So the real cure is to have some way to rate limit Zone usage, making
it harder and harder to allocate in a zone as the zone gets more and
more full. But how do you do this in a non-deadlocky way?

Buy hey, I'm not that knowledgeable about the VM.