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dirty page balancing: Get rid of broken unmapped_ratio logic
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This code harks back to the days when we didn't count dirty mapped
pages, which led us to try to balance the number of dirty unmapped pages
by how much unmapped memory there was in the system.

That makes no sense any more, since now the dirty counts include the
mapped pages.  Not to mention that the math doesn't work with HIGHMEM
machines anyway, and causes the unmapped_ratio to potentially turn
negative (which we do catch thanks to clamping it at a minimum value,
but I mention that as an indication of how broken the code is).

The code also was written at a time when the default dirty ratio was
much larger, and the unmapped_ratio logic effectively capped that large
dirty ratio a bit.  Again, we've since lowered the dirty ratio rather
aggressively, further lessening the point of that code.

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Linus Torvalds committed Nov 16, 2007
1 parent adea27f commit 8c08634
Showing 1 changed file with 0 additions and 8 deletions.
8 changes: 0 additions & 8 deletions mm/page-writeback.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -297,20 +297,12 @@ get_dirty_limits(long *pbackground, long *pdirty, long *pbdi_dirty,
{
int background_ratio; /* Percentages */
int dirty_ratio;
int unmapped_ratio;
long background;
long dirty;
unsigned long available_memory = determine_dirtyable_memory();
struct task_struct *tsk;

unmapped_ratio = 100 - ((global_page_state(NR_FILE_MAPPED) +
global_page_state(NR_ANON_PAGES)) * 100) /
available_memory;

dirty_ratio = vm_dirty_ratio;
if (dirty_ratio > unmapped_ratio / 2)
dirty_ratio = unmapped_ratio / 2;

if (dirty_ratio < 5)
dirty_ratio = 5;

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