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    SubjectRe: [patch 4/6] mm: merge populate and nopage into fault (fixes nonlinear)
    On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 02:19:22PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
    > On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 14:08 +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
    >
    > > > > The thing is, I don't think anybody who uses these things cares
    > > > > about any of the 'problems' you want to fix, do they? We are
    > > > > interested in dirty pages only for the correctness issue, rather
    > > > > than performance. Same as reclaim.
    > > >
    > > > If so, we can just stick to the dead slow but correct 'scan the full
    > > > vma' page_mkclean() and nobody would ever trigger it.
    > >
    > > Not if we restricted it to root and mlocked tmpfs. But then why
    > > wouldn't you just do it with the much more efficient msync walk,
    > > so that if root does want to do writeout via these things, it does
    > > not blow up?
    >
    > This is all used on ram based filesystems right, they all have
    > BDI_CAP_NO_WRITEBACK afaik, so page_mkclean will never get called
    > anyway. Mlock doesn't avoid getting page_mkclean called.
    >
    > Those who use this on a 'real' filesystem will get hit in the face by a
    > linear scanning page_mkclean(), but AFAIK nobody does this anyway.

    But somebody might do it. I just don't know why you'd want to make
    this _worse_ when the msync option would work?

    > Restricting it to root for such filesystems is unwanted, that'd severely
    > handicap both UML and Oracle as I understand it (are there other users
    > of this feature around?)

    Why? I think they all use tmpfs backings, don't they?

    > msync() might never get called and then we're back with the old
    > behaviour where we can surprise the VM with a ton of dirty pages.

    But we're root. With your patch, root *can't* do nonlinear writeback
    well. Ever. With msync, at least you give them enough rope.

    > > > What is the DoS scenario wrt reclaim? We really ought to fix that if
    > > > real, those UML farms run on nothing but nonlinear reclaim I'd think.
    > >
    > > I guess you can just increase the computational complexity of
    > > reclaim quite easily.
    >
    > Right, on first glance it doesn't look to be too bad, but I should take
    > a closer look.

    Well I don't think UML uses nonlinear yet anyway, does it? Can they
    make do with restricting nonlinear to mlocked vmas, I wonder? Probably
    not.

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