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Commit a1c3bfb2 authored by Johannes Weiner's avatar Johannes Weiner Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm/page-writeback.c: do not count anon pages as dirtyable memory



The VM is currently heavily tuned to avoid swapping.  Whether that is
good or bad is a separate discussion, but as long as the VM won't swap
to make room for dirty cache, we can not consider anonymous pages when
calculating the amount of dirtyable memory, the baseline to which
dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio are applied.

A simple workload that occupies a significant size (40+%, depending on
memory layout, storage speeds etc.) of memory with anon/tmpfs pages and
uses the remainder for a streaming writer demonstrates this problem.  In
that case, the actual cache pages are a small fraction of what is
considered dirtyable overall, which results in an relatively large
portion of the cache pages to be dirtied.  As kswapd starts rotating
these, random tasks enter direct reclaim and stall on IO.

Only consider free pages and file pages dirtyable.

Signed-off-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reported-by: default avatarTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Tested-by: default avatarTejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: default avatarRik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent a804552b
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