vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

Since 2.6.28 zone->prev_priority is unused. Then it can be removed
safely. It reduce stack usage slightly.

Now I have to say that I'm sorry. 2 years ago, I thought prev_priority
can be integrate again, it's useful. but four (or more) times trying
haven't got good performance number. Thus I give up such approach.

The rest of this changelog is notes on prev_priority and why it existed in
the first place and why it might be not necessary any more. This information
is based heavily on discussions between Andrew Morton, Rik van Riel and
Kosaki Motohiro who is heavily quotes from.

Historically prev_priority was important because it determined when the VM
would start unmapping PTE pages. i.e. there are no balances of note within
the VM, Anon vs File and Mapped vs Unmapped. Without prev_priority, there
is a potential risk of unnecessarily increasing minor faults as a large
amount of read activity of use-once pages could push mapped pages to the
end of the LRU and get unmapped.

There is no proof this is still a problem but currently it is not considered
to be. Active files are not deactivated if the active file list is smaller
than the inactive list reducing the liklihood that file-mapped pages are
being pushed off the LRU and referenced executable pages are kept on the
active list to avoid them getting pushed out by read activity.

Even if it is a problem, prev_priority prev_priority wouldn't works
nowadays. First of all, current vmscan still a lot of UP centric code. it
expose some weakness on some dozens CPUs machine. I think we need more and
more improvement.

The problem is, current vmscan mix up per-system-pressure, per-zone-pressure
and per-task-pressure a bit. example, prev_priority try to boost priority to
other concurrent priority. but if the another task have mempolicy restriction,
it is unnecessary, but also makes wrong big latency and exceeding reclaim.
per-task based priority + prev_priority adjustment make the emulation of
per-system pressure. but it have two issue 1) too rough and brutal emulation
2) we need per-zone pressure, not per-system.

Another example, currently DEF_PRIORITY is 12. it mean the lru rotate about
2 cycle (1/4096 + 1/2048 + 1/1024 + .. + 1) before invoking OOM-Killer.
but if 10,0000 thrreads enter DEF_PRIORITY reclaim at the same time, the
system have higher memory pressure than priority==0 (1/4096*10,000 > 2).
prev_priority can't solve such multithreads workload issue. In other word,
prev_priority concept assume the sysmtem don't have lots threads."

Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Michael Rubin <mrubin@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 15 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h
index 9ed9c459b14..6e6e62648a4 100644
--- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
+++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
@@ -348,21 +348,6 @@ struct zone {
 	atomic_long_t		vm_stat[NR_VM_ZONE_STAT_ITEMS];
 
 	/*
-	 * prev_priority holds the scanning priority for this zone.  It is
-	 * defined as the scanning priority at which we achieved our reclaim
-	 * target at the previous try_to_free_pages() or balance_pgdat()
-	 * invocation.
-	 *
-	 * We use prev_priority as a measure of how much stress page reclaim is
-	 * under - it drives the swappiness decision: whether to unmap mapped
-	 * pages.
-	 *
-	 * Access to both this field is quite racy even on uniprocessor.  But
-	 * it is expected to average out OK.
-	 */
-	int prev_priority;
-
-	/*
 	 * The target ratio of ACTIVE_ANON to INACTIVE_ANON pages on
 	 * this zone's LRU.  Maintained by the pageout code.
 	 */