mm: fix calculation of dirtyable memory
authorSonny Rao <sonnyrao@chromium.org>
Thu, 20 Dec 2012 23:05:07 +0000 (15:05 -0800)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:06:48 +0000 (09:06 -0800)
commit711cf004f2148f1d1967bc5eca025019e5001212
tree83ba439251b29610cc5ea1f6626d0190521769d9
parent6cb6a94380506d9e5491b8e145811bd676ce6f3d
mm: fix calculation of dirtyable memory

commit c8b74c2f6604923de91f8aa6539f8bb934736754 upstream.

The system uses global_dirtyable_memory() to calculate number of
dirtyable pages/pages that can be allocated to the page cache.  A bug
causes an underflow thus making the page count look like a big unsigned
number.  This in turn confuses the dirty writeback throttling to
aggressively write back pages as they become dirty (usually 1 page at a
time).  This generally only affects systems with highmem because the
underflowed count gets subtracted from the global count of dirtyable
memory.

The problem was introduced with v3.2-4896-gab8fabd

Fix is to ensure we don't get an underflowed total of either highmem or
global dirtyable memory.

Signed-off-by: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Puneet Kumar <puneetster@chromium.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Tested-by: Damien Wyart <damien.wyart@free.fr>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
mm/page-writeback.c