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Mel Gorman authored
High-order watermark checking exists for two reasons -- kswapd high-order awareness and protection for high-order atomic requests. Historically the kernel depended on MIGRATE_RESERVE to preserve min_free_kbytes as high-order free pages for as long as possible. This patch introduces MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC that reserves pageblocks for high-order atomic allocations on demand and avoids using those blocks for order-0 allocations. This is more flexible and reliable than MIGRATE_RESERVE was. A MIGRATE_HIGHORDER pageblock is created when an atomic high-order allocation request steals a pageblock but limits the total number to 1% of the zone. Callers that speculatively abuse atomic allocations for long-lived high-order allocations to access the reserve will quickly fail. Note that SLUB is currently not such an abuser as it reclaims at least once. It is possible that the pageblock stolen has few suitable high-order pages and will need to steal again in the near future but there would need to be strong justification to search all pageblocks for an ideal candidate. The pageblocks are unreserved if an allocation fails after a direct reclaim attempt. The watermark checks account for the reserved pageblocks when the allocation request is not a high-order atomic allocation. The reserved pageblocks can not be used for order-0 allocations. This may allow temporary wastage until a failed reclaim reassigns the pageblock. This is deliberate as the intent of the reservation is to satisfy a limited number of atomic high-order short-lived requests if the system requires them. The stutter benchmark was used to evaluate this but while it was running there was a systemtap script that randomly allocated between 1 high-order page and 12.5% of memory's worth of order-3 pages using GFP_ATOMIC. This is much larger than the potential reserve and it does not attempt to be realistic. It is intended to stress random high-order allocations from an unknown source, show that there is a reduction in failures without introducing an anomaly where atomic allocations are more reliable than regular allocations. The amount of memory reserved varied throughout the workload as reserves were created and reclaimed under memory pressure. The allocation failures once the workload warmed up were as follows; 4.2-rc5-vanilla 70% 4.2-rc5-atomic-reserve 56% The failure rate was also measured while building multiple kernels. The failure rate was 14% but is 6% with this patch applied. Overall, this is a small reduction but the reserves are small relative to the number of allocation requests. In early versions of the patch, the failure rate reduced by a much larger amount but that required much larger reserves and perversely made atomic allocations seem more reliable than regular allocations. [yalin.wang2010@gmail.com: fix redundant check and a memory leak] Signed-off-by:
Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> Acked-by:
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