This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

    mm: vmscan: do not swap anon pages just because free+file is low

to the 3.14-stable tree which can be found at:
    
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
     mm-vmscan-do-not-swap-anon-pages-just-because-free-file-is-low.patch
and it can be found in the queue-3.14 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree,
please let <[email protected]> know about it.


>From 0bf1457f0cfca7bc026a82323ad34bcf58ad035d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2014 16:04:10 -0700
Subject: mm: vmscan: do not swap anon pages just because free+file is low

From: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>

commit 0bf1457f0cfca7bc026a82323ad34bcf58ad035d upstream.

Page reclaim force-scans / swaps anonymous pages when file cache drops
below the high watermark of a zone in order to prevent what little cache
remains from thrashing.

However, on bigger machines the high watermark value can be quite large
and when the workload is dominated by a static anonymous/shmem set, the
file set might just be a small window of used-once cache.  In such
situations, the VM starts swapping heavily when instead it should be
recycling the no longer used cache.

This is a longer-standing problem, but it's more likely to trigger after
commit 81c0a2bb515f ("mm: page_alloc: fair zone allocator policy")
because file pages can no longer accumulate in a single zone and are
dispersed into smaller fractions among the available zones.

To resolve this, do not force scan anon when file pages are low but
instead rely on the scan/rotation ratios to make the right prediction.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <[email protected]>
Cc: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Cc: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Cc: Suleiman Souhlal <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

---
 mm/vmscan.c |   16 +---------------
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 15 deletions(-)

--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -1848,7 +1848,7 @@ static void get_scan_count(struct lruvec
        struct zone *zone = lruvec_zone(lruvec);
        unsigned long anon_prio, file_prio;
        enum scan_balance scan_balance;
-       unsigned long anon, file, free;
+       unsigned long anon, file;
        bool force_scan = false;
        unsigned long ap, fp;
        enum lru_list lru;
@@ -1902,20 +1902,6 @@ static void get_scan_count(struct lruvec
                get_lru_size(lruvec, LRU_INACTIVE_FILE);
 
        /*
-        * If it's foreseeable that reclaiming the file cache won't be
-        * enough to get the zone back into a desirable shape, we have
-        * to swap.  Better start now and leave the - probably heavily
-        * thrashing - remaining file pages alone.
-        */
-       if (global_reclaim(sc)) {
-               free = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES);
-               if (unlikely(file + free <= high_wmark_pages(zone))) {
-                       scan_balance = SCAN_ANON;
-                       goto out;
-               }
-       }
-
-       /*
         * There is enough inactive page cache, do not reclaim
         * anything from the anonymous working set right now.
         */


Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-3.14/mm-page_alloc-spill-to-remote-nodes-before-waking-kswapd.patch
queue-3.14/mm-vmscan-do-not-swap-anon-pages-just-because-free-file-is-low.patch
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