[PATCH] vmscan: notice slab shrinking

Fix a problem identified by Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>

kswapd will set a zone into all_unreclaimable state if it sees that we're not
successfully reclaiming LRU pages.  But that fails to notice that we're
successfully reclaiming slab obects, so we can set all_unreclaimable too soon.

So change shrink_slab() to return a success indication if it actually
reclaimed some objects, and don't assume that the zone is all_unreclaimable if
that is true.  This means that we won't enter all_unreclaimable state if we
are successfully freeing slab objects but we're not yet actually freeing slab
pages, due to internal fragmentation.

(hm, this has a shortcoming.  We could be successfully freeing ZONE_NORMAL
slab objects while being really oom on ZONE_DMA.  If that happens then kswapd
might burn a lot of CPU.  But given that there might be some slab objects in
ZONE_DMA, perhaps that is appropriate.)

Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
1 file changed