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authorChristoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>2010-09-09 16:38:17 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2010-09-09 18:57:25 -0700
commitaa45484031ddee09b06350ab8528bfe5b2c76d1c (patch)
tree6758072232db9a54453022ec3e6cede35d52001c /include/linux/mmzone.h
parent72853e2991a2702ae93aaf889ac7db743a415dd3 (diff)
mm: page allocator: calculate a better estimate of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory is low and kswapd is awake
Ordinarily watermark checks are based on the vmstat NR_FREE_PAGES as it is cheaper than scanning a number of lists. To avoid synchronization overhead, counter deltas are maintained on a per-cpu basis and drained both periodically and when the delta is above a threshold. On large CPU systems, the difference between the estimated and real value of NR_FREE_PAGES can be very high. If NR_FREE_PAGES is much higher than number of real free page in buddy, the VM can allocate pages below min watermark, at worst reducing the real number of pages to zero. Even if the OOM killer kills some victim for freeing memory, it may not free memory if the exit path requires a new page resulting in livelock. This patch introduces a zone_page_state_snapshot() function (courtesy of Christoph) that takes a slightly more accurate view of an arbitrary vmstat counter. It is used to read NR_FREE_PAGES while kswapd is awake to avoid the watermark being accidentally broken. The estimate is not perfect and may result in cache line bounces but is expected to be lighter than the IPI calls necessary to continually drain the per-cpu counters while kswapd is awake. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux/mmzone.h')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/mmzone.h13
1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h
index 6e6e62648a4d..3984c4eb41fd 100644
--- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
+++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
@@ -284,6 +284,13 @@ struct zone {
unsigned long watermark[NR_WMARK];
/*
+ * When free pages are below this point, additional steps are taken
+ * when reading the number of free pages to avoid per-cpu counter
+ * drift allowing watermarks to be breached
+ */
+ unsigned long percpu_drift_mark;
+
+ /*
* We don't know if the memory that we're going to allocate will be freeable
* or/and it will be released eventually, so to avoid totally wasting several
* GB of ram we must reserve some of the lower zone memory (otherwise we risk
@@ -441,6 +448,12 @@ static inline int zone_is_oom_locked(const struct zone *zone)
return test_bit(ZONE_OOM_LOCKED, &zone->flags);
}
+#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
+unsigned long zone_nr_free_pages(struct zone *zone);
+#else
+#define zone_nr_free_pages(zone) zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES)
+#endif /* CONFIG_SMP */
+
/*
* The "priority" of VM scanning is how much of the queues we will scan in one
* go. A value of 12 for DEF_PRIORITY implies that we will scan 1/4096th of the