From: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.com>
To: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>, Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>,
lsf-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
linux-mm@kvack.org
Subject: Re: [ATTEND] many topics
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 06:34:29 +1100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87mvehd0ze.fsf@notabene.neil.brown.name> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20170123170924.ubx2honzxe7g34on@thunk.org>
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On Tue, Jan 24 2017, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 10:05:44PM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>>
>> I don't have a clear picture in my mind of when Java promotes objects
>> from nursery to tenure
>
> It's typically on the order of minutes. :-)
>
>> ... which is not too different from my lack of
>> understanding of what the MM layer considers "temporary" :-) Is it
>> acceptable usage to allocate a SCSI command (guaranteed to be freed
>> within 30 seconds) from the temporary area? Or should it only be used
>> for allocations where the thread of control is not going to sleep between
>> allocation and freeing?
>
> What the mm folks have said is that it's to prevent fragmentation. If
> that's the optimization, whether or not you the process is allocating
> the memory sleeps for a few hundred milliseconds, or even seconds, is
> really in the noise compared with the average lifetime of an inode in
> the inode cache, or a page in the page cache....
>
> Why do you think it matters whether or not we sleep? I've not heard
> any explanation for the assumption for why this might be important.
Because "TEMPORARY" implies a limit to the amount of time, and sleeping
is the thing that causes a process to take a large amount of time. It
seems like an obvious connection to me.
Imagine I want to allocate a large contiguous region in the
ZONE_MOVEABLE region. I find a mostly free region, so I just need to
move those last few pages. If there is a limit on how long a process
can sleep while holding an allocation from ZONE_MOVEABLE, then I know
how long, at most, I need to wait before those pages become either free
or movable. If those processes can wait indefinitely, then I might have
to wait indefinitely to get this large region.
"temporary" doesn't mean anything without a well defined time limit.
But maybe I completely misunderstand.
NeilBrown
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-01-23 19:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-01-18 5:49 [ATTEND] many topics Matthew Wilcox
2017-01-18 10:13 ` [Lsf-pc] " Jan Kara
2017-01-18 11:26 ` willy
2017-01-18 13:32 ` Michal Hocko
2017-01-19 11:05 ` willy
2017-01-19 11:33 ` Michal Hocko
2017-01-19 11:52 ` willy
2017-01-19 12:11 ` Michal Hocko
2017-01-21 0:11 ` NeilBrown
2017-01-21 13:16 ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-01-22 4:45 ` NeilBrown
2017-01-23 6:05 ` Matthew Wilcox
2017-01-23 6:30 ` NeilBrown
2017-01-23 6:35 ` Matthew Wilcox
2017-01-23 17:09 ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-01-23 19:34 ` NeilBrown [this message]
2017-01-25 14:36 ` Vlastimil Babka
2017-01-25 20:36 ` Matthew Wilcox
2017-01-25 21:15 ` Vlastimil Babka
2017-01-25 23:19 ` NeilBrown
2017-01-26 8:56 ` Michal Hocko
2017-01-26 21:20 ` NeilBrown
2017-01-27 13:12 ` Michal Hocko
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