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authorDave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>2021-02-24 12:09:15 -0800
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2021-02-24 13:38:34 -0800
commit519983645a9f2ec339cabfa0c6ef7b09be985dd0 (patch)
treeee4826a7b99abb77c5b99f3cb8f82671cf4f144b /Documentation
parentff5461176213d5fd5cfb7e981f9add4d856e415a (diff)
mm/vmscan: restore zone_reclaim_mode ABI
I went to go add a new RECLAIM_* mode for the zone_reclaim_mode sysctl. Like a good kernel developer, I also went to go update the documentation. I noticed that the bits in the documentation didn't match the bits in the #defines. The VM never explicitly checks the RECLAIM_ZONE bit. The bit is, however implicitly checked when checking 'node_reclaim_mode==0'. The RECLAIM_ZONE #define was removed in a cleanup. That, by itself is fine. But, when the bit was removed (bit 0) the _other_ bit locations also got changed. That's not OK because the bit values are documented to mean one specific thing. Users surely do not expect the meaning to change from kernel to kernel. The end result is that if someone had a script that did: sysctl vm.zone_reclaim_mode=1 it would have gone from enabling node reclaim for clean unmapped pages to writing out pages during node reclaim after the commit in question. That's not great. Put the bits back the way they were and add a comment so something like this is a bit harder to do again. Update the documentation to make it clear that the first bit is ignored. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210219172555.FF0CDF23@viggo.jf.intel.com Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com> Fixes: 648b5cf368e0 ("mm/vmscan: remove unused RECLAIM_OFF/RECLAIM_ZONE") Reviewed-by: Ben Widawsky <ben.widawsky@intel.com> Reviewed-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Alex Shi <alex.shi@linux.alibaba.com> Cc: Daniel Wagner <dwagner@suse.de> Cc: "Tobin C. Harding" <tobin@kernel.org> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Huang Ying <ying.huang@intel.com> Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> Cc: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst10
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
index e35a3f2fb006..586cd4b86428 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst
@@ -983,11 +983,11 @@ that benefit from having their data cached, zone_reclaim_mode should be
left disabled as the caching effect is likely to be more important than
data locality.
-zone_reclaim may be enabled if it's known that the workload is partitioned
-such that each partition fits within a NUMA node and that accessing remote
-memory would cause a measurable performance reduction. The page allocator
-will then reclaim easily reusable pages (those page cache pages that are
-currently not used) before allocating off node pages.
+Consider enabling one or more zone_reclaim mode bits if it's known that the
+workload is partitioned such that each partition fits within a NUMA node
+and that accessing remote memory would cause a measurable performance
+reduction. The page allocator will take additional actions before
+allocating off node pages.
Allowing zone reclaim to write out pages stops processes that are
writing large amounts of data from dirtying pages on other nodes. Zone