mm/page-writeback: highmem_is_dirtyable option

Add vm.highmem_is_dirtyable toggle

A 32 bit machine with HIGHMEM64 enabled running DCC has an MMAPed file of
approximately 2Gb size which contains a hash format that is written
randomly by the dbclean process.  On 2.6.16 this process took a few
minutes.  With lowmem only accounting of dirty ratios, this takes about 12
hours of 100% disk IO, all random writes.

Include a toggle in /proc/sys/vm/highmem_is_dirtyable which can be set to 1 to
add the highmem back to the total available memory count.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Fix the CONFIG_DETECT_SOFTLOCKUP=y build]
Signed-off-by: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
Cc: Ethan Solomita <solo@google.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: WU Fengguang <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
index 0b1b0c008613..07231afca72d 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
@@ -1315,6 +1315,21 @@ for writeout by the pdflush daemons.  It is expressed in 100'ths of a second.
 Data which has been dirty in-memory for longer than this interval will be
 written out next time a pdflush daemon wakes up.
 
+highmem_is_dirtyable
+--------------------
+
+Only present if CONFIG_HIGHMEM is set.
+
+This defaults to 0 (false), meaning that the ratios set above are calculated
+as a percentage of lowmem only.  This protects against excessive scanning
+in page reclaim, swapping and general VM distress.
+
+Setting this to 1 can be useful on 32 bit machines where you want to make
+random changes within an MMAPed file that is larger than your available
+lowmem without causing large quantities of random IO.  Is is safe if the
+behavior of all programs running on the machine is known and memory will
+not be otherwise stressed.
+
 legacy_va_layout
 ----------------