mm: vmscan: when reclaiming for compaction, ensure there are sufficient free pages...
authorMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:19:45 +0000 (17:19 -0800)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Wed, 1 Aug 2012 19:27:18 +0000 (12:27 -0700)
commitd50462a3a29fc5f53ef4a5d74eb693b4d4cb1512
treead17a74f1b57d55b9572ef70b77e71bc9ba69dcf
parentf869774c37710ef2b773d167d184b9936988d07f
mm: vmscan: when reclaiming for compaction, ensure there are sufficient free pages available

commit fe4b1b244bdb96136855f2c694071cb09d140766 upstream.

Stable note: Not tracked on Bugzilla. THP and compaction was found to
aggressively reclaim pages and stall systems under different
situations that was addressed piecemeal over time. This patch
addresses a problem where the fix regressed THP allocation
success rates.

In commit e0887c19 ("vmscan: limit direct reclaim for higher order
allocations"), Rik noted that reclaim was too aggressive when THP was
enabled.  In his initial patch he used the number of free pages to decide
if reclaim should abort for compaction.  My feedback was that reclaim and
compaction should be using the same logic when deciding if reclaim should
be aborted.

Unfortunately, this had the effect of reducing THP success rates when the
workload included something like streaming reads that continually
allocated pages.  The window during which compaction could run and return
a THP was too small.

This patch combines Rik's two patches together.  compaction_suitable() is
still used to decide if reclaim should be aborted to allow compaction is
used.  However, it will also ensure that there is a reasonable buffer of
free pages available.  This improves upon the THP allocation success rates
but bounds the number of pages that are freed for compaction.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel<riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Andy Isaacson <adi@hexapodia.org>
Cc: Nai Xia <nai.xia@gmail.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
mm/vmscan.c