b39d0ee263
Memory compaction has a couple significant drawbacks as the allocation order increases, specifically: - isolate_freepages() is responsible for finding free pages to use as migration targets and is implemented as a linear scan of memory starting at the end of a zone, - failing order-0 watermark checks in memory compaction does not account for how far below the watermarks the zone actually is: to enable migration, there must be *some* free memory available. Per the above, watermarks are not always suffficient if isolate_freepages() cannot find the free memory but it could require hundreds of MBs of reclaim to even reach this threshold (read: potentially very expensive reclaim with no indication compaction can be successful), and - if compaction at this order has failed recently so that it does not even run as a result of deferred compaction, looping through reclaim can often be pointless. For hugepage allocations, these are quite substantial drawbacks because these are very high order allocations (order-9 on x86) and falling back to doing reclaim can potentially be *very* expensive without any indication that compaction would even be successful. Reclaim itself is unlikely to free entire pageblocks and certainly no reliance should be put on it to do so in isolation (recall lumpy reclaim). This means we should avoid reclaim and simply fail hugepage allocation if compaction is deferred. It is also not helpful to thrash a zone by doing excessive reclaim if compaction may not be able to access that memory. If order-0 watermarks fail and the allocation order is sufficiently large, it is likely better to fail the allocation rather than thrashing the zone. Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG <s.priebe@profihost.ag> Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> |
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| arch | ||
| block | ||
| certs | ||
| crypto | ||
| Documentation | ||
| drivers | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| LICENSES | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.