mm, compaction: make whole_zone flag ignore cached scanner positions
Patch series "make direct compaction more deterministic")
This is mostly a followup to Michal's oom detection rework, which
highlighted the need for direct compaction to provide better feedback in
reclaim/compaction loop, so that it can reliably recognize when
compaction cannot make further progress, and allocation should invoke
OOM killer or fail. We've discussed this at LSF/MM [1] where I proposed
expanding the async/sync migration mode used in compaction to more
general "priorities". This patchset adds one new priority that just
overrides all the heuristics and makes compaction fully scan all zones.
I don't currently think that we need more fine-grained priorities, but
we'll see. Other than that there's some smaller fixes and cleanups,
mainly related to the THP-specific hacks.
I've tested this with stress-highalloc in GFP_KERNEL order-4 and
THP-like order-9 scenarios. There's some improvement for compaction
stats for the order-4, which is likely due to the better watermarks
handling. In the previous version I reported mostly noise wrt
compaction stats, and decreased direct reclaim - now the reclaim is
without difference. I believe this is due to the less aggressive
compaction priority increase in patch 6.
"before" is a mmotm tree prior to 4.7 release plus the first part of the
series that was sent and merged separately
before after
order-4:
Compaction stalls 27216 30759
Compaction success 19598 25475
Compaction failures 7617 5283
Page migrate success 370510 464919
Page migrate failure 25712 27987
Compaction pages isolated 849601 1041581
Compaction migrate scanned 143146541 101084990
Compaction free scanned 208355124 144863510
Compaction cost 1403 1210
order-9:
Compaction stalls 7311 7401
Compaction success 1634 1683
Compaction failures 5677 5718
Page migrate success 194657 183988
Page migrate failure 4753 4170
Compaction pages isolated 498790 456130
Compaction migrate scanned 565371 524174
Compaction free scanned 4230296 4250744
Compaction cost 215 203
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/684611/
This patch (of 11):
A recent patch has added whole_zone flag that compaction sets when
scanning starts from the zone boundary, in order to report that zone has
been fully scanned in one attempt. For allocations that want to try
really hard or cannot fail, we will want to introduce a mode where
scanning whole zone is guaranteed regardless of the cached positions.
This patch reuses the whole_zone flag in a way that if it's already
passed true to compaction, the cached scanner positions are ignored.
Employing this flag during reclaim/compaction loop will be done in the
next patch. This patch however converts compaction invoked from
userspace via procfs to use this flag. Before this patch, the cached
positions were first reset to zone boundaries and then read back from
struct zone, so there was a window where a parallel compaction could
replace the reset values, making the manual compaction less effective.
Using the flag instead of performing reset is more robust.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160810091226.6709-2-vbabka@suse.cz
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Tested-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <lstoakes@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2 files changed