Hi Linus, the following patch does: 1) Remove GFP_BUFFER and HIGHMEM related deadlocks, by letting these allocations fail instead of looping forever in __alloc_pages() when they cannot make any progress there. Now Linux no longer hangs on highmem machines with heavy write loads. 2) Clean up the __alloc_pages() / __alloc_pages_limit() code a bit, moving the direct reclaim condition from the latter function into the former so we run it less often ;) 3) Remove the superfluous wakeups from __alloc_pages(), not only are the tests a real CPU eater, they also have the potential of waking up bdflush in a situation where it shouldn't run in the first place. The kswapd wakeup didn't seem to have any effect either. 4) Do make sure GFP_BUFFER allocations NEVER eat into the very last pages of the system. It is important to preserve the following ordering: - normal allocations - GFP_BUFFER - atomic allocations - other recursive allocations Using this ordering, we can be pretty sure that eg. a GFP_BUFFER allocation to swap something out to an encrypted device won't eat the memory the device driver will need to perform its functions. It also means that a gigabit network flood won't eat those pages... 5) Change nr_free_buffer_pages() a bit to not return pages which cannot be used as buffer pages, this makes a BIG difference on highmem machines (which now DO have a working write throttling again). 6) Simplify the refill_inactive() loop enough that it actually works again. Calling page_launder() and shrink_i/d_memory() by the same if condition means that the different caches get balanced against each other again. The illogical argument for not shrinking the slab cache while we're under a free shortage turned out to be very much illogical too. All needed buffer heads will have been allocated in page_launder() and shrink_i/d_memory() before we get here and we can be pretty sure that these functions will keep re-using those same buffer heads as soon as the IO finishes. regards, Rik -- Linux MM bugzilla: http://linux-mm.org/bugzilla.shtml Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose... http://www.surriel.com/ http://www.conectiva.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/