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  • Linus Torvalds's avatar
    dirty page balancing: Get rid of broken unmapped_ratio logic · 8c086340
    Linus Torvalds authored
    
    
    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: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    8c086340