Skip to content
  • Vlastimil Babka's avatar
    mm, compaction: more focused lru and pcplists draining · fdaf7f5c
    Vlastimil Babka authored
    
    
    The goal of memory compaction is to create high-order freepages through
    page migration.  Page migration however puts pages on the per-cpu lru_add
    cache, which is later flushed to per-cpu pcplists, and only after pcplists
    are drained the pages can actually merge.  This can happen due to the
    per-cpu caches becoming full through further freeing, or explicitly.
    
    During direct compaction, it is useful to do the draining explicitly so
    that pages merge as soon as possible and compaction can detect success
    immediately and keep the latency impact at minimum.  However the current
    implementation is far from ideal.  Draining is done only in
    __alloc_pages_direct_compact(), after all zones were already compacted,
    and the decisions to continue or stop compaction in individual zones was
    done without the last batch of migrations being merged.  It is also
    missing the draining of lru_add cache before the pcplists.
    
    This patch moves the draining for direct compaction into compact_zone().
    It adds the missing lru_cache draining and uses the newly introduced
    single zone pcplists draining to reduce overhead and avoid impact on
    unrelated zones.  Draining is only performed when it can actually lead to
    merging of a page of desired order (passed by cc->order).  This means it
    is only done when migration occurred in the previously scanned cc->order
    aligned block(s) and the migration scanner is now pointing to the next
    cc->order aligned block.
    
    The patch has been tested with stress-highalloc benchmark from mmtests.
    Although overal allocation success rates of the benchmark were not
    affected, the number of detected compaction successes has doubled.  This
    suggests that allocations were previously successful due to implicit
    merging caused by background activity, making a later allocation attempt
    succeed immediately, but not attributing the success to compaction.  Since
    stress-highalloc always tries to allocate almost the whole memory, it
    cannot show the improvement in its reported success rate metric.  However
    after this patch, compaction should detect success and terminate earlier,
    reducing the direct compaction latencies in a real scenario.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
    Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
    Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
    Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
    Cc: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@mina86.com>
    Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
    Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarRik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
    Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    fdaf7f5c