Re: [PATCH 5/5] mm: writeback: Prioritise dirty inodes encountered by direct reclaim for background flushing

[Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 11:09:59AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 03:31:27PM +0100, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > It is preferable that no dirty pages are dispatched from the page
> > reclaim path. If reclaim is encountering dirty pages, it implies that
> > either reclaim is getting ahead of writeback or use-once logic has
> > prioritise pages for reclaiming that are young relative to when the
> > inode was dirtied.
> 
> what does this buy us? 

Very little. The vague intention was to avoid a situation where kswapds
priority was raised such that it had to write pages to clean a
particular zone.

> If at all we should prioritize by a zone,
> e.g. tell write_cache_pages only to bother with writing things out
> if the dirty page is in a given zone.   We'd probably still cluster
> around it to make sure we get good I/O patterns, but would only start
> I/O if it has a page we actually care about.
> 

That would make more sense. I've dropped this patch entirely.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs