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  1. Jul 17, 2007
    • Nicholas Piggin's avatar
      fs: introduce some page/buffer invariants · 787d2214
      Nicholas Piggin authored 
      

It is a bug to set a page dirty if it is not uptodate unless it has
buffers.  If the page has buffers, then the page may be dirty (some buffers
dirty) but not uptodate (some buffers not uptodate).  The exception to this
rule is if the set_page_dirty caller is racing with truncate or invalidate.

A buffer can not be set dirty if it is not uptodate.

If either of these situations occurs, it indicates there could be some data
loss problem.  Some of these warnings could be a harmless one where the
page or buffer is set uptodate immediately after it is dirtied, however we
should fix those up, and enforce this ordering.

Bring the order of operations for truncate into line with those of
invalidate.  This will prevent a page from being able to go !uptodate while
we're holding the tree_lock, which is probably a good thing anyway.

Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      787d2214
    • Rusty Russell's avatar
      mm: clean up and kernelify shrinker registration · 8e1f936b
      Rusty Russell authored 
      

I can never remember what the function to register to receive VM pressure
is called.  I have to trace down from __alloc_pages() to find it.

It's called "set_shrinker()", and it needs Your Help.

1) Don't hide struct shrinker.  It contains no magic.
2) Don't allocate "struct shrinker".  It's not helpful.
3) Call them "register_shrinker" and "unregister_shrinker".
4) Call the function "shrink" not "shrinker".
5) Reduce the 17 lines of waffly comments to 13, but document it properly.

Signed-off-by: default avatarRusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Cc: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      8e1f936b
    • Andy Whitcroft's avatar
      Lumpy Reclaim V4 · 5ad333eb
      Andy Whitcroft authored 
      

When we are out of memory of a suitable size we enter reclaim.  The current
reclaim algorithm targets pages in LRU order, which is great for fairness at
order-0 but highly unsuitable if you desire pages at higher orders.  To get
pages of higher order we must shoot down a very high proportion of memory;
>95% in a lot of cases.

This patch set adds a lumpy reclaim algorithm to the allocator.  It targets
groups of pages at the specified order anchored at the end of the active and
inactive lists.  This encourages groups of pages at the requested orders to
move from active to inactive, and active to free lists.  This behaviour is
only triggered out of direct reclaim when higher order pages have been
requested.

This patch set is particularly effective when utilised with an
anti-fragmentation scheme which groups pages of similar reclaimability
together.

This patch set is based on Peter Zijlstra's lumpy reclaim V2 patch which forms
the foundation.  Credit to Mel Gorman for sanitity checking.

Mel said:

  The patches have an application with hugepage pool resizing.

  When lumpy-reclaim is used used with ZONE_MOVABLE, the hugepages pool can
  be resized with greater reliability.  Testing on a desktop machine with 2GB
  of RAM showed that growing the hugepage pool with ZONE_MOVABLE on it's own
  was very slow as the success rate was quite low.  Without lumpy-reclaim,
  each attempt to grow the pool by 100 pages would yield 1 or 2 hugepages.
  With lumpy-reclaim, getting 40 to 70 hugepages on each attempt was typical.

[akpm@osdl.org: ia64 pfn_to_nid fixes and loop cleanup]
[bunk@stusta.de: static declarations for internal functions]
[a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl: initial lumpy V2 implementation]
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Bob Picco <bob.picco@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      5ad333eb
    • Mel Gorman's avatar
      Add __GFP_MOVABLE for callers to flag allocations from high memory that may be migrated · 769848c0
      Mel Gorman authored 
      

It is often known at allocation time whether a page may be migrated or not.
This patch adds a flag called __GFP_MOVABLE and a new mask called
GFP_HIGH_MOVABLE.  Allocations using the __GFP_MOVABLE can be either migrated
using the page migration mechanism or reclaimed by syncing with backing
storage and discarding.

An API function very similar to alloc_zeroed_user_highpage() is added for
__GFP_MOVABLE allocations called alloc_zeroed_user_highpage_movable().  The
flags used by alloc_zeroed_user_highpage() are not changed because it would
change the semantics of an existing API.  After this patch is applied there
are no in-kernel users of alloc_zeroed_user_highpage() so it probably should
be marked deprecated if this patch is merged.

Note that this patch includes a minor cleanup to the use of __GFP_ZERO in
shmem.c to keep all flag modifications to inode->mapping in the
shmem_dir_alloc() helper function.  This clean-up suggestion is courtesy of
Hugh Dickens.

Additional credit goes to Christoph Lameter and Linus Torvalds for shaping the
concept.  Credit to Hugh Dickens for catching issues with shmem swap vector
and ramfs allocations.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: build fix]
[hugh@veritas.com: __GFP_ZERO cleanup]
Signed-off-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      769848c0
  3. Jul 16, 2007