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David Rientjes b39d0ee263 mm, page_alloc: avoid expensive reclaim when compaction may not succeed
Memory compaction has a couple significant drawbacks as the allocation
order increases, specifically:

 - isolate_freepages() is responsible for finding free pages to use as
   migration targets and is implemented as a linear scan of memory
   starting at the end of a zone,

 - failing order-0 watermark checks in memory compaction does not account
   for how far below the watermarks the zone actually is: to enable
   migration, there must be *some* free memory available.  Per the above,
   watermarks are not always suffficient if isolate_freepages() cannot
   find the free memory but it could require hundreds of MBs of reclaim to
   even reach this threshold (read: potentially very expensive reclaim with
   no indication compaction can be successful), and

 - if compaction at this order has failed recently so that it does not even
   run as a result of deferred compaction, looping through reclaim can often
   be pointless.

For hugepage allocations, these are quite substantial drawbacks because
these are very high order allocations (order-9 on x86) and falling back to
doing reclaim can potentially be *very* expensive without any indication
that compaction would even be successful.

Reclaim itself is unlikely to free entire pageblocks and certainly no
reliance should be put on it to do so in isolation (recall lumpy reclaim).
This means we should avoid reclaim and simply fail hugepage allocation if
compaction is deferred.

It is also not helpful to thrash a zone by doing excessive reclaim if
compaction may not be able to access that memory.  If order-0 watermarks
fail and the allocation order is sufficiently large, it is likely better
to fail the allocation rather than thrashing the zone.

Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG <s.priebe@profihost.ag>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2019-09-28 14:05:38 -07:00
arch The main change here is a revert of reverts. We recently simplified some 2019-09-14 16:07:40 -07:00
block block: remove REQ_NOWAIT_INLINE 2019-08-15 11:09:16 -06:00
certs Revert "Merge tag 'keys-acl-20190703' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dhowells/linux-fs" 2019-07-10 18:43:43 -07:00
crypto USB / PHY patches for 5.3-rc1 2019-07-11 15:40:06 -07:00
Documentation riscv: modify the Image header to improve compatibility with the ARM64 header 2019-09-13 19:03:52 -07:00
drivers virtio: a last minute revert 2019-09-14 16:02:49 -07:00
fs Revert "ext4: make __ext4_get_inode_loc plug" 2019-09-15 12:32:03 -07:00
include Revert "Revert "Revert "mm, thp: consolidate THP gfp handling into alloc_hugepage_direct_gfpmask"" 2019-09-28 14:05:38 -07:00
init Merge branch 'work.mount0' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2019-07-19 10:42:02 -07:00
ipc ipc: fix sparc64 ipc() wrapper 2019-09-07 21:42:25 +02:00
kernel Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net 2019-09-14 12:20:38 -07:00
lib lib/Kconfig: fix OBJAGG in lib/ menu structure 2019-09-11 09:30:10 +01:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Rename other to deprecated 2019-05-03 06:34:32 -06:00
mm mm, page_alloc: avoid expensive reclaim when compaction may not succeed 2019-09-28 14:05:38 -07:00
net sctp: destroy bucket if failed to bind addr 2019-09-13 22:06:20 +02:00
samples auxdisplay: Fix a typo in cfag12864b-example.c 2019-08-08 20:00:18 +02:00
scripts SPDX fixes for 5.3-rc5 2019-08-18 09:26:16 -07:00
security keys: Fix missing null pointer check in request_key_auth_describe() 2019-09-05 14:19:25 -07:00
sound sound fixes for 5.3-rc8 2019-09-05 10:26:20 -07:00
tools Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net 2019-09-14 12:20:38 -07:00
usr kbuild: enable arch/s390/include/uapi/asm/zcrypt.h for uapi header test 2019-07-23 10:45:46 +02:00
virt arm64 fixes for -rc7 2019-08-28 10:37:21 -07:00
.clang-format clang-format: Update with the latest for_each macro list 2019-08-31 10:00:51 +02:00
.cocciconfig
.get_maintainer.ignore Opt out of scripts/get_maintainer.pl 2019-05-16 10:53:40 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set git diff driver for C source code files 2016-10-07 18:46:30 -07:00
.gitignore .gitignore: Add compilation database file 2019-07-27 12:18:19 +09:00
.mailmap mailmap: add aliases for Dmitry Safonov 2019-08-30 18:00:50 -07:00
COPYING COPYING: use the new text with points to the license files 2018-03-23 12:41:45 -06:00
CREDITS Remove references to dead website. 2019-07-19 12:22:04 -07:00
Kbuild Kbuild updates for v5.1 2019-03-10 17:48:21 -07:00
Kconfig docs: kbuild: convert docs to ReST and rename to *.rst 2019-06-14 14:21:21 -06:00
MAINTAINERS MAINTAINERS: add myself as maintainer for xilinx axiethernet driver 2019-09-06 15:17:16 +02:00
Makefile Linux 5.3 2019-09-15 14:19:32 -07:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.