page-allocator: limit the number of MIGRATE_RESERVE pageblocks per zone
After anti-fragmentation was merged, a bug was reported whereby devices that depended on high-order atomic allocations were failing. The solution was to preserve a property in the buddy allocator which tended to keep the minimum number of free pages in the zone at the lower physical addresses and contiguous. To preserve this property, MIGRATE_RESERVE was introduced and a number of pageblocks at the start of a zone would be marked "reserve", the number of which depended on min_free_kbytes. Anti-fragmentation works by avoiding the mixing of page migratetypes within the same pageblock. One way of helping this is to increase min_free_kbytes because it becomes less like that it will be necessary to place pages of of MIGRATE_RESERVE is unbounded, the free memory is kept there in large contiguous blocks instead of helping anti-fragmentation as much as it should. With the page-allocator tracepoint patches applied, it was found during anti-fragmentation tests that the number of fragmentation-related events were far higher than expected even with min_free_kbytes at higher values. This patch limits the number of MIGRATE_RESERVE blocks that exist per zone to two. For example, with a sufficient min_free_kbytes, 4MB of memory will be kept aside on an x86-64 and remain more or less free and contiguous for the systems uptime. This should be sufficient for devices depending on high-order atomic allocations while helping fragmentation control when min_free_kbytes is tuned appropriately. As side-effect of this patch is that the reserve variable is converted to int as unsigned long was the wrong type to use when ensuring that only the required number of reserve blocks are created. With the patches applied, fragmentation-related events as measured by the page allocator tracepoints were significantly reduced when running some fragmentation stress-tests on systems with min_free_kbytes tuned to a value appropriate for hugepage allocations at runtime. On x86, the events recorded were reduced by 99.8%, on x86-64 by 99.72% and on ppc64 by 99.83%. Signed-off-by:Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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