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>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
c8b74c2f66