Compaction caches if a pageblock was scanned and no pages were isolated so
that the pageblocks can be skipped in the future to reduce scanning. This
information is not cleared by the page allocator based on activity due to
the impact it would have to the page allocator fast paths. Hence there is
a requirement that something clear the cache or pageblocks will be skipped
forever. Currently the cache is cleared if there were a number of recent
allocation failures and it has not been cleared within the last 5 seconds.
Time-based decisions like this are terrible as they have no relationship
to VM activity and is basically a big hammer.
Unfortunately, accurate heuristics would add cost to some hot paths so
this patch implements a rough heuristic. There are two cases where the
cache is cleared.
1. If a !kswapd process completes a compaction cycle (migrate and free
scanner meet), the zone is marked compact_blockskip_flush. When kswapd
goes to sleep, it will clear the cache. This is expected to be the
common case where the cache is cleared. It does not really matter if
kswapd happens to be asleep or going to sleep when the flag is set as
it will be woken on the next allocation request.
2. If there have been multiple failures recently and compaction just
finished being deferred then a process will clear the cache and start a
full scan. This situation happens if there are multiple high-order
allocation requests under heavy memory pressure.
The clearing of the PG_migrate_skip bits and other scans is inherently
racy but the race is harmless. For allocations that can fail such as THP,
they will simply fail. For requests that cannot fail, they will retry the
allocation. Tests indicated that scanning rates were roughly similar to
when the time-based heuristic was used and the allocation success rates
were similar.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Richard Davies <richard@arachsys.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Cc: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
62997027ca