tree e06405192d674561bf2718ab03879c32103ae34e
parent a804552b9a15c931cfc2a92a2e0aed1add8b580a
author Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> 1391033141 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1391041359 -0800

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: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reported-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>