A pgdat tracks if recent reclaim encountered too many dirty, writeback
or congested pages.  The flags control whether kswapd writes pages back
from reclaim context, tags pages for immediate reclaim when IO
completes, whether processes block on wait_iff_congested and whether
kswapd blocks when too many pages marked for immediate reclaim are
encountered.

The state is cleared in a check function with side-effects.  With the
patch "mm, vmscan: fix zone balance check in prepare_kswapd_sleep", the
timing of when the bits get cleared changed.  Due to the way the check
works, it'll clear the bits if ZONE_DMA is balanced for a GFP_DMA
allocation because it does not account for lowmem reserves properly.

For the simoop workload, kswapd is not stalling when it should due to
the premature clearing, writing pages from reclaim context like crazy
and generally being unhelpful.

This patch resets the pgdat bits related to page reclaim only when
kswapd is going to sleep.  The comparison with simoop is then

                                         4.11.0-rc1            4.11.0-rc1            4.11.0-rc1
                                            vanilla           fixcheck-v2              clear-v2
Amean    p50-Read             21670074.18 (  0.00%) 20464344.18 (  5.56%) 19786774.76 (  8.69%)
Amean    p95-Read             25456267.64 (  0.00%) 25721423.64 ( -1.04%) 24101956.27 (  5.32%)
Amean    p99-Read             29369064.73 (  0.00%) 30174230.76 ( -2.74%) 27691872.71 (  5.71%)
Amean    p50-Write                1390.30 (  0.00%)     1395.28 ( -0.36%)     1011.91 ( 27.22%)
Amean    p95-Write              412901.57 (  0.00%)    37737.74 ( 90.86%)    34874.98 ( 91.55%)
Amean    p99-Write             6668722.09 (  0.00%)   666489.04 ( 90.01%)   575449.60 ( 91.37%)
Amean    p50-Allocation          78714.31 (  0.00%)    86286.22 ( -9.62%)    84246.26 ( -7.03%)
Amean    p95-Allocation         175533.51 (  0.00%)   351812.27 (-100.42%)   400058.43 (-127.91%)
Amean    p99-Allocation         247003.02 (  0.00%)  6291171.56 (-2447.00%) 10905600.00 (-4315.17%)

Read latency is improved, write latency is mostly improved but
allocation latency is regressed.  kswapd is still reclaiming
inefficiently, pages are being written back from writeback context and a
host of other issues.  However, given the change, it needed to be
spelled out why the side-effect was moved.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170309075657.25121-3-mgorman@techsingularity.net


Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Shantanu Goel <sgoel01@yahoo.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>