During work on kcompactd integration I have spotted a confusing check of
balance_classzone_idx, which I believe is bogus.
The balanced_classzone_idx is filled by balance_pgdat() as the highest
zone it attempted to balance. This was introduced by commit dc83edd941
("mm: kswapd: use the classzone idx that kswapd was using for
sleeping_prematurely()").
The intention is that (as expressed in today's function names), the
value used for kswapd_shrink_zone() calls in balance_pgdat() is the same
as for the decisions in kswapd_try_to_sleep().
An unwanted side-effect of that commit was breaking the checks in
kswapd() whether there was another kswapd_wakeup with a tighter (=lower)
classzone_idx. Commits 215ddd6664 ("mm: vmscan: only read
new_classzone_idx from pgdat when reclaiming successfully") and
d2ebd0f6b8 ("kswapd: avoid unnecessary rebalance after an unsuccessful
balancing") tried to fixed, but apparently introduced a bogus check that
this patch removes.
Consider zone indexes X < Y < Z, where:
- Z is the value used for the first kswapd wakeup.
- Y is returned as balanced_classzone_idx, which means zones with index higher
than Y (including Z) were found to be unreclaimable.
- X is the value used for the second kswapd wakeup
The new wakeup with value X means that kswapd is now supposed to balance
harder all zones with index <= X. But instead, due to Y < Z, it will go
sleep and won't read the new value X. This is subtly wrong.
The effect of this patch is that kswapd will react better in some
situations, where e.g. the first wakeup is for ZONE_DMA32, the second is
for ZONE_DMA, and due to unreclaimable ZONE_NORMAL. Before this patch,
kswapd would go sleep instead of reclaiming ZONE_DMA harder. I expect
these situations are very rare, and more value is in better
maintainability due to the removal of confusing and bogus check.
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
81c5857b27