tree 8b5900c7caea18ca2b28ef07cbf2698a360a9232
parent ca236ccb1f2b1f47084f5e9584d3b512a9866914
author Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> 1427815066 -0400
committer Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> 1427815066 -0400

mm: vmscan: disable memcg direct reclaim stalling if cgroup writeback support is in use

Because writeback wasn't cgroup aware before, the usual dirty
throttling mechanism in balance_dirty_pages() didn't work for
processes under memcg limit.  The writeback path didn't know how much
memory is available or how fast the dirty pages are being written out
for a given memcg and balance_dirty_pages() didn't have any measure of
IO back pressure for the memcg.

To work around the issue, memcg implemented an ad-hoc dirty throttling
mechanism in the direct reclaim path by stalling on pages under
writeback which are encountered during direct reclaim scan.  This is
rather ugly and crude - none of the configurability, fairness, or
bandwidth-proportional distribution of the normal path.

The previous patches implemented proper memcg aware dirty throttling
when cgroup writeback is in use making the ad-hoc mechanism
unnecessary.  This patch disables direct reclaim stalling for such
case.

Note: I disabled the parts which seemed obvious and it behaves fine
      while testing but my understanding of this code path is
      rudimentary and it's quite possible that I got something wrong.
      Please let me know if I got some wrong or more global_reclaim()
      sites should be updated.

v2: The original patch removed the direct stalling mechanism which
    breaks legacy hierarchies.  Conditionalize instead of removing.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com>