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Memory pressure can put dirty pages at the end of the LRU without anybody running into dirty limits. Don't start writing individual pages from kswapd while the flushers might be asleep. Unlike the old direct reclaim flusher wakeup (removed in the next patch) that flushes the number of pages just scanned, this patch wakes the flushers for all outstanding dirty pages. That seemed to perform better in a synthetic test that pushes dirty pages to the end of the LRU and into reclaim, because we know LRU aging outstrips writeback already, and this way we give younger dirty pages a headstart rather than wait until reclaim runs into them as well. It also means less plugging and risk of exhausting the struct request pool from reclaim. There is a concern that this will cause temporary files that used to get dirtied and truncated before writeback to now get written to disk under memory pressure. If this turns out to be a real problem, we'll have to revisit this and tame the reclaim flusher wakeups. [hannes@cmpxchg.org: mention dirty expiration as a condition] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170126174739.GA30636@cmpxchg.org Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170123181641.23938-3-hannes@cmpxchg.org Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Acked-by: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.