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Commit 14f69140 authored by Henry Willard's avatar Henry Willard Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm: limit boost_watermark on small zones

Commit 1c30844d ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an
external fragmentation event occurs") adds a boost_watermark() function
which increases the min watermark in a zone by at least
pageblock_nr_pages or the number of pages in a page block.

On Arm64, with 64K pages and 512M huge pages, this is 8192 pages or
512M.  It does this regardless of the number of managed pages managed in
the zone or the likelihood of success.

This can put the zone immediately under water in terms of allocating
pages from the zone, and can cause a small machine to fail immediately
due to OoM.  Unlike set_recommended_min_free_kbytes(), which
substantially increases min_free_kbytes and is tied to THP,
boost_watermark() can be called even if THP is not active.

The problem is most likely to appear on architectures such as Arm64
where pageblock_nr_pages is very large.

It is desirable to run the kdump capture kernel in as small a space as
possible to avoid wasting memory.  In some ...
parent 8d58f222
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