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authorMel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>2012-10-08 16:32:47 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2012-10-09 16:22:51 +0900
commit62997027ca5b3d4618198ed8b1aba40b61b1137b (patch)
treecf26352e091ae10f7201d98ca774a8c0e5f8cdfd /mm/vmscan.c
parentc89511ab2f8fe2b47585e60da8af7fd213ec877e (diff)
mm: compaction: clear PG_migrate_skip based on compaction and reclaim activity
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>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/vmscan.c')
-rw-r--r--mm/vmscan.c8
1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index 1ee4b69a28a..b010efc4389 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -2895,6 +2895,14 @@ static void kswapd_try_to_sleep(pg_data_t *pgdat, int order, int classzone_idx)
*/
set_pgdat_percpu_threshold(pgdat, calculate_normal_threshold);
+ /*
+ * Compaction records what page blocks it recently failed to
+ * isolate pages from and skips them in the future scanning.
+ * When kswapd is going to sleep, it is reasonable to assume
+ * that pages and compaction may succeed so reset the cache.
+ */
+ reset_isolation_suitable(pgdat);
+
if (!kthread_should_stop())
schedule();