[PATCH] overcommit: add calculate_totalreserve_pages()

These patches are an enhancement of OVERCOMMIT_GUESS algorithm in
__vm_enough_memory().

- why the kernel needed patching

  When the kernel can't allocate anonymous pages in practice, currnet
  OVERCOMMIT_GUESS could return success. This implementation might be
  the cause of oom kill in memory pressure situation.

  If the Linux runs with page reservation features like
  /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_ratio and without swap region, I think
  the oom kill occurs easily.

- the overall design approach in the patch

  When the OVERCOMMET_GUESS algorithm calculates number of free pages,
  the reserved free pages are regarded as non-free pages.

  This change helps to avoid the pitfall that the number of free pages
  become less than the number which the kernel tries to keep free.

- testing results

  I tested the patches using my test kernel module.

  If the patches aren't applied to the kernel, __vm_enough_memory()
  returns success in the situation but autual page allocation is
  failed.

  On the other hand, if the patches are applied to the kernel, memory
  allocation failure is avoided since __vm_enough_memory() returns
  failure in the situation.

  I checked that on i386 SMP 16GB memory machine. I haven't tested on
  nommu environment currently.

This patch adds totalreserve_pages for __vm_enough_memory().

Calculate_totalreserve_pages() checks maximum lowmem_reserve pages and
pages_high in each zone. Finally, the function stores the sum of each
zone to totalreserve_pages.

The totalreserve_pages is calculated when the VM is initilized.
And the variable is updated when /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_raito
or /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes are changed.

Signed-off-by: Hideo Aoki <haoki@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/swap.h b/include/linux/swap.h
index 54eac8a..5b1fdf1 100644
--- a/include/linux/swap.h
+++ b/include/linux/swap.h
@@ -155,6 +155,7 @@ extern void swapin_readahead(swp_entry_t, unsigned long, struct vm_area_struct *
 /* linux/mm/page_alloc.c */
 extern unsigned long totalram_pages;
 extern unsigned long totalhigh_pages;
+extern unsigned long totalreserve_pages;
 extern long nr_swap_pages;
 extern unsigned int nr_free_pages(void);
 extern unsigned int nr_free_pages_pgdat(pg_data_t *pgdat);