Skip to content
Commit 02aa0cdd authored by Vlastimil Babka's avatar Vlastimil Babka Committed by Linus Torvalds
Browse files

mm, page_alloc: count movable pages when stealing from pageblock

When stealing pages from pageblock of a different migratetype, we count
how many free pages were stolen, and change the pageblock's migratetype
if more than half of the pageblock was free.  This might be too
conservative, as there might be other pages that are not free, but were
allocated with the same migratetype as our allocation requested.

While we cannot determine the migratetype of allocated pages precisely
(at least without the page_owner functionality enabled), we can count
pages that compaction would try to isolate for migration - those are
either on LRU or __PageMovable().  The rest can be assumed to be
MIGRATE_RECLAIMABLE or MIGRATE_UNMOVABLE, which we cannot easily
distinguish.  This counting can be done as part of free page stealing
with little additional overhead.

The page stealing code is changed so that it considers free pages plus
pages of the "good" migratetype for the decision whether to change
pageblock's migratetype.

The result should be more accurate migratetype of pageblocks wrt the
actual pages in the pageblocks, when stealing from semi-occupied
pageblocks.  This should help the efficiency of page grouping by
mobility.

In testing based on 4.9 kernel with stress-highalloc from mmtests
configured for order-4 GFP_KERNEL allocations, this patch has reduced
the number of unmovable allocations falling back to movable pageblocks
by 47%.  The number of movable allocations falling back to other
pageblocks are increased by 55%, but these events don't cause permanent
fragmentation, so the tradeoff should be positive.  Later patches also
offset the movable fallback increase to some extent.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: merge fix]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170307131545.28577-5-vbabka@suse.cz


Signed-off-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.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>
parent 3bc48f96
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment