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, 10 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
index 8137482abd6e..c689b60af000 100644
--- a/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ b/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -69,6 +69,12 @@ static inline long sync_writeback_pages(void)
 int dirty_background_ratio = 5;
 
 /*
+ * free highmem will not be subtracted from the total free memory
+ * for calculating free ratios if vm_highmem_is_dirtyable is true
+ */
+int vm_highmem_is_dirtyable;
+
+/*
  * The generator of dirty data starts writeback at this percentage
  */
 int vm_dirty_ratio = 10;
@@ -287,7 +293,10 @@ static unsigned long determine_dirtyable_memory(void)
         x = global_page_state(NR_FREE_PAGES)
                 + global_page_state(NR_INACTIVE)
                 + global_page_state(NR_ACTIVE);
-        x -= highmem_dirtyable_memory(x);
+
+        if (!vm_highmem_is_dirtyable)
+                x -= highmem_dirtyable_memory(x);
+
         return x + 1;   /* Ensure that we never return 0 */
 }