51b8c1fe25
Historically (pre-2.5), the inode shrinker used to reclaim only empty inodes and skip over those that still contained page cache. This caused problems on highmem hosts: struct inode could put fill lowmem zones before the cache was getting reclaimed in the highmem zones. To address this, the inode shrinker started to strip page cache to facilitate reclaiming lowmem. However, this comes with its own set of problems: the shrinkers may drop actively used page cache just because the inodes are not currently open or dirty - think working with a large git tree. It further doesn't respect cgroup memory protection settings and can cause priority inversions between containers. Nowadays, the page cache also holds non-resident info for evicted cache pages in order to detect refaults. We've come to rely heavily on this data inside reclaim for protecting the cache workingset and driving swap behavior. We also use it to quantify and report workload health through psi. The latter in turn is used for fleet health monitoring, as well as driving automated memory sizing of workloads and containers, proactive reclaim and memory offloading schemes. The consequences of dropping page cache prematurely is that we're seeing subtle and not-so-subtle failures in all of the above-mentioned scenarios, with the workload generally entering unexpected thrashing states while losing the ability to reliably detect it. To fix this on non-highmem systems at least, going back to rotating inodes on the LRU isn't feasible. We've tried (commit |
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README
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.