Skip to content
Commit fef903ef authored by Srivatsa S. Bhat's avatar Srivatsa S. Bhat Committed by Linus Torvalds
Browse files

mm/page_allo.c: restructure free-page stealing code and fix a bug



The free-page stealing code in __rmqueue_fallback() is somewhat hard to
follow, and has an incredible amount of subtlety hidden inside!

First off, there is a minor bug in the reporting of change-of-ownership of
pageblocks.  Under some conditions, we try to move upto
'pageblock_nr_pages' no.  of pages to the preferred allocation list.  But
we change the ownership of that pageblock to the preferred type only if we
manage to successfully move atleast half of that pageblock (or if
page_group_by_mobility_disabled is set).

However, the current code ignores the latter part and sets the
'migratetype' variable to the preferred type, irrespective of whether we
actually changed the pageblock migratetype of that block or not.  So, the
page_alloc_extfrag tracepoint can end up printing incorrect info (i.e.,
'change_ownership' might be shown as 1 when it must have been 0).

So fixing this involves moving the update of the 'migratetype' variable to
the right place.  But looking closer, we observe that the 'migratetype'
variable is used subsequently for checks such as "is_migrate_cma()".
Obviously the intent there is to check if the *fallback* type is
MIGRATE_CMA, but since we already set the 'migratetype' variable to
start_migratetype, we end up checking if the *preferred* type is
MIGRATE_CMA!!

To make things more interesting, this actually doesn't cause a bug in
practice, because we never change *anything* if the fallback type is CMA.

So, restructure the code in such a way that it is trivial to understand
what is going on, and also fix the above mentioned bug.  And while at it,
also add a comment explaining the subtlety behind the migratetype used in
the call to expand().

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: remove unneeded `inline', small coding-style fix]
Signed-off-by: default avatarSrivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Cody P Schafer <cody@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent b8af2941
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