tree 8a522baa63e84d97620fca8a321ed4182bd937a7
parent 81c5857b279e6b18f6ff0d1975e80a07af542cd1
author Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> 1458249488 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1458252574 -0700

mm, compaction: introduce kcompactd

Memory compaction can be currently performed in several contexts:

 - kswapd balancing a zone after a high-order allocation failure
 - direct compaction to satisfy a high-order allocation, including THP
   page fault attemps
 - khugepaged trying to collapse a hugepage
 - manually from /proc

The purpose of compaction is two-fold.  The obvious purpose is to
satisfy a (pending or future) high-order allocation, and is easy to
evaluate.  The other purpose is to keep overal memory fragmentation low
and help the anti-fragmentation mechanism.  The success wrt the latter
purpose is more

The current situation wrt the purposes has a few drawbacks:

 - compaction is invoked only when a high-order page or hugepage is not
   available (or manually).  This might be too late for the purposes of
   keeping memory fragmentation low.
 - direct compaction increases latency of allocations.  Again, it would
   be better if compaction was performed asynchronously to keep
   fragmentation low, before the allocation itself comes.
 - (a special case of the previous) the cost of compaction during THP
   page faults can easily offset the benefits of THP.
 - kswapd compaction appears to be complex, fragile and not working in
   some scenarios.  It could also end up compacting for a high-order
   allocation request when it should be reclaiming memory for a later
   order-0 request.

To improve the situation, we should be able to benefit from an
equivalent of kswapd, but for compaction - i.e. a background thread
which responds to fragmentation and the need for high-order allocations
(including hugepages) somewhat proactively.

One possibility is to extend the responsibilities of kswapd, which could
however complicate its design too much.  It should be better to let
kswapd handle reclaim, as order-0 allocations are often more critical
than high-order ones.

Another possibility is to extend khugepaged, but this kthread is a
single instance and tied to THP configs.

This patch goes with the option of a new set of per-node kthreads called
kcompactd, and lays the foundations, without introducing any new
tunables.  The lifecycle mimics kswapd kthreads, including the memory
hotplug hooks.

For compaction, kcompactd uses the standard compaction_suitable() and
ompact_finished() criteria and the deferred compaction functionality.
Unlike direct compaction, it uses only sync compaction, as there's no
allocation latency to minimize.

This patch doesn't yet add a call to wakeup_kcompactd.  The kswapd
compact/reclaim loop for high-order pages will be replaced by waking up
kcompactd in the next patch with the description of what's wrong with
the old approach.

Waking up of the kcompactd threads is also tied to kswapd activity and
follows these rules:
 - we don't want to affect any fastpaths, so wake up kcompactd only from
   the slowpath, as it's done for kswapd
 - if kswapd is doing reclaim, it's more important than compaction, so
   don't invoke kcompactd until kswapd goes to sleep
 - the target order used for kswapd is passed to kcompactd

Future possible future uses for kcompactd include the ability to wake up
kcompactd on demand in special situations, such as when hugepages are
not available (currently not done due to __GFP_NO_KSWAPD) or when a
fragmentation event (i.e.  __rmqueue_fallback()) occurs.  It's also
possible to perform periodic compaction with kcompactd.

[arnd@arndb.de: fix build errors with kcompactd]
[paul.gortmaker@windriver.com: don't use modular references for non modular code]
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>