mm/page-writeback.c: do not count anon pages as dirtyable memory

The VM is currently heavily tuned to avoid swapping.  Whether that is
good or bad is a separate discussion, but as long as the VM won't swap
to make room for dirty cache, we can not consider anonymous pages when
calculating the amount of dirtyable memory, the baseline to which
dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio are applied.

A simple workload that occupies a significant size (40+%, depending on
memory layout, storage speeds etc.) of memory with anon/tmpfs pages and
uses the remainder for a streaming writer demonstrates this problem.  In
that case, the actual cache pages are a small fraction of what is
considered dirtyable overall, which results in an relatively large
portion of the cache pages to be dirtied.  As kswapd starts rotating
these, random tasks enter direct reclaim and stall on IO.

Only consider free pages and file pages dirtyable.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reported-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 22 deletions

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 90c4075d8d75..a9c74b409681 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -147,7 +147,7 @@ static bool global_reclaim(struct scan_control *sc)
 }
 #endif
 
-unsigned long zone_reclaimable_pages(struct zone *zone)
+static unsigned long zone_reclaimable_pages(struct zone *zone)
 {
         int nr;
 
@@ -3315,27 +3315,6 @@ void wakeup_kswapd(struct zone *zone, int order, enum zone_type classzone_idx)
         wake_up_interruptible(&pgdat->kswapd_wait);
 }
 
-/*
- * The reclaimable count would be mostly accurate.
- * The less reclaimable pages may be
- * - mlocked pages, which will be moved to unevictable list when encountered
- * - mapped pages, which may require several travels to be reclaimed
- * - dirty pages, which is not "instantly" reclaimable
- */
-unsigned long global_reclaimable_pages(void)
-{
-        int nr;
-
-        nr = global_page_state(NR_ACTIVE_FILE) +
-             global_page_state(NR_INACTIVE_FILE);
-
-        if (get_nr_swap_pages() > 0)
-                nr += global_page_state(NR_ACTIVE_ANON) +
-                      global_page_state(NR_INACTIVE_ANON);
-
-        return nr;
-}
-
 #ifdef CONFIG_HIBERNATION
 /*
  * Try to free `nr_to_reclaim' of memory, system-wide, and return the number of