On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 12:15:01PM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote: > On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > > > > > <> What Christoph is proposing is doing recursive reclaim and not > > > > initiating writeout. This will only work _IFF_ there are clean pages > > > > about. Which in the general case need not be true (memory might be > > > > packed with anonymous pages - consider an MPI cluster doing computation > > > > stuff). So this gets us a workload dependant solution - which IMHO is > > > > bad! > > > > > > Although you will quite likely have at least a couple of MB worth of > > > clean program text. The important part of recursive reclaim is that it > > > doesn't so easily allow reclaim to blow all memory reserves (including > > > interrupt context). Sure you still have theoretical deadlocks, but if > > > I understand correctly, they are going to be lessened. I would be > > > really interested to see if even just these recursive reclaim patches > > > eliminate the problem in practice. > > > > were we much bothered by the buffered write deadlock? - why accept a > > known deadlock if a solid solution is quite attainable? > > Buffered write deadlock? How does that exactly occur? Memory allocation in > the writeout path while we hold locks?
Different topic. Peter was talking about the write(2) write deadlock where we take a page fault while holding a page lock (which leads to lock inversion, taking the lock twice etc.) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
