Re: Inclusion of zoned inactive/free shortage patch

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> > >
> > > Cool.
> > >
> > > Willing to write a patch and give it some preliminary testing?
> >
> > Sure. However its not _that_ easy. We do have a global inactive target.
> 
> Absolutely. But this is why it's easier to have the more relaxed
> constraints - we have to make sure that the global inactive target is
> clearly lower than the sum of the relaxed local targets.
> 
> That way, whenever there is a global inactive need, we _clearly_ have one
> or more zones (usually _all_ of them with any reasonably balanced system:
> and note how this whole logic will strive to _add_ balance) that will
> trigger the test, and there is no worry that we get into the nasty case
> where we suddenly start to try to overly cannibalize one zone horribly.
> 
> > There is no perzone inactive shortage, which is needed to calculate
> > "zone_inactive_plenty()".
> 
> Right. But the gobal inactivity shortage can certainly be a clue to how to
> do this.
> 
> So when the global shortage is effectively
> 
> MAX of
> 
> 	(freepages.high + inactive_target) - nr_free_pages - inactive_clean - inactive_dirty
> 
> or
> 
> 	per-zone shortage.
> 
> So for this discussion we can ignore the per-zone shortage case (because
> _obviously_ the per-zone "inactive_plenty()" cannot be a shortage of
> inactive ;), and only concentrate on making sure that the sum of the
> per-zone inactive_plenty decisions is noticeably more than the global
> shortage (for example, by a factor of two, or something like that). So one
> suggestion would be to take the same logic as the global shortage, but
> apply it to just the local zone, and then multiply by two (as the slop to
> make sure that we don't every under-estimate).
> 
> So something like
> 
>     inactive_plenty(zone)
>     {
> 	if (!zone->nrpages)
> 		return 0;
> 	shortage = zone->pages_high;
> 	shortage -= zone->inactive_dirty_pages;
> 	shortage -= zone->inactive_clean_pages;
> 	shortage -= zone->free_pages;
> 
> 	/* zone inactive-target is 1/2 of the number of pages */
> 	return shortage < zone->nrpages / 2;
>     }

Wait. Don't you mean:

	/* True if we have enough inactive pages for this zone */
	
	inactive_plenty(zone)
	{
		if (!zone->nrpages)
			return 0;
		inactive = zone->inactive_dirty_pages;
		inactive += zone->inactive_clean_pages;
		inactive += zone->free_pages
		
		return (inactive < zone->nrpages / 2); 
	}

?