Commit 3eb2771b authored Jul 28, 2016 by Vlastimil Babka Committed by Linus Torvalds Jul 28, 2016

mm, page_alloc: make THP-specific decisions more generic

Since THP allocations during page faults can be costly, extra decisions
are employed for them to avoid excessive reclaim and compaction, if the
initial compaction doesn't look promising.  The detection has never been
perfect as there is no gfp flag specific to THP allocations.  At this
moment it checks the whole combination of flags that makes up
GFP_TRANSHUGE, and hopes that no other users of such combination exist,
or would mind being treated the same way.  Extra care is also taken to
separate allocations from khugepaged, where latency doesn't matter that
much.

It is however possible to distinguish these allocations in a simpler and
more reliable way.  The key observation is that after the initial
compaction followed by the first iteration of "standard"
reclaim/compaction, both __GFP_NORETRY allocations and costly
allocations without __GFP_REPEAT are declared as failures:

        /* Do not loop if specifically requested */
        if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY)
                goto nopage;

        /*
         * Do not retry costly high order allocations unless they are
         * __GFP_REPEAT
         */
        if (order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER && !(gfp_mask & __GFP_REPEAT))
                goto nopage;

This means we can further distinguish allocations that are costly order
*and* additionally include the __GFP_NORETRY flag.  As it happens,
GFP_TRANSHUGE allocations do already fall into this category.  This will
also allow other costly allocations with similar high-order benefit vs
latency considerations to use this semantic.  Furthermore, we can
distinguish THP allocations that should try a bit harder (such as from
khugepageed) by removing __GFP_NORETRY, as will be done in the next
patch.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160721073614.24395-6-vbabka@suse.cz


Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent a8161d1e

mm/page_alloc.c

+9 −13

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -3085,7 +3085,6 @@ out:
		return page;
		}


		/*
		* Maximum number of compaction retries wit a progress before OOM
		* killer is consider as the only way to move forward.
		@@ -3373,11 +3372,6 @@ bool gfp_pfmemalloc_allowed(gfp_t gfp_mask)
		return false;
		}

		static inline bool is_thp_gfp_mask(gfp_t gfp_mask)
		{
		return (gfp_mask & (GFP_TRANSHUGE \| __GFP_KSWAPD_RECLAIM)) == GFP_TRANSHUGE;
		}

		/*
		* Maximum number of reclaim retries without any progress before OOM killer
		* is consider as the only way to move forward.
		@@ -3536,8 +3530,11 @@ __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
		if (page)
		goto got_pg;

		/* Checks for THP-specific high-order allocations */
		if (is_thp_gfp_mask(gfp_mask)) {
		/*
		* Checks for costly allocations with __GFP_NORETRY, which
		* includes THP page fault allocations
		*/
		if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY) {
		/*
		* If compaction is deferred for high-order allocations,
		* it is because sync compaction recently failed. If
		@@ -3557,11 +3554,10 @@ __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
		goto nopage;

		/*
		* It can become very expensive to allocate transparent
		* hugepages at fault, so use asynchronous memory
		* compaction for THP unless it is khugepaged trying to
		* collapse. All other requests should tolerate at
		* least light sync migration.
		* Looks like reclaim/compaction is worth trying, but
		* sync compaction could be very expensive, so keep
		* using async compaction, unless it's khugepaged
		* trying to collapse.
		*/
		if (!(current->flags & PF_KTHREAD))
		migration_mode = MIGRATE_ASYNC;

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