mm: compaction: prevent kswapd compacting memory to reduce CPU usage
This patch reverts 5a03b051 ("thp: use compaction in kswapd for GFP_ATOMIC order > 0") due to reports stating that kswapd CPU usage was higher and IRQs were being disabled more frequently. This was reported at http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/alsa-user/msg09885.html. Without this patch applied, CPU usage by kswapd hovers around the 20% mark according to the tester (Arthur Marsh: http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/alsa-user/msg09899.html ). With this patch applied, it's around 2%. The problem is not related to THP which specifies __GFP_NO_KSWAPD but is triggered by high-order allocations hitting the low watermark for their order and waking kswapd on kernels with CONFIG_COMPACTION set. The most common trigger for this is network cards configured for jumbo frames but it's also possible it'll be triggered by fork-heavy workloads (order-1) and some wireless cards which depend on order-1 allocations. The symptoms for the user will be high CPU usage by kswapd in low-memory situations which could be confused with another writeback problem. While a patch like 5a03b051 may be reintroduced in the future, this patch plays it safe for now and reverts it. [mel@csn.ul.ie: Beefed up the changelog] Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Reported-by: Arthur Marsh <arthur.marsh@internode.on.net> Tested-by: Arthur Marsh <arthur.marsh@internode.on.net> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [2.6.38.1] Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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