linux-toradex.git/include/linux/compaction.h, branch v3.19.7

mm, compaction: simplify deferred compaction

2014-12-11T01:41:06+00:00

Since commit 53853e2d2bfb ("mm, compaction: defer each zone individually
instead of preferred zone"), compaction is deferred for each zone where
sync direct compaction fails, and reset where it succeeds.  However, it
was observed that for DMA zone compaction often appeared to succeed
while subsequent allocation attempt would not, due to different outcome
of watermark check.

In order to properly defer compaction in this zone, the candidate zone
has to be passed back to __alloc_pages_direct_compact() and compaction
deferred in the zone after the allocation attempt fails.

The large source of mismatch between watermark check in compaction and
allocation was the lack of alloc_flags and classzone_idx values in
compaction, which has been fixed in the previous patch.  So with this
problem fixed, we can simplify the code by removing the candidate_zone
parameter and deferring in __alloc_pages_direct_compact().

After this patch, the compaction activity during stress-highalloc
benchmark is still somewhat increased, but it's negligible compared to the
increase that occurred without the better watermark checking.  This
suggests that it is still possible to apparently succeed in compaction but
fail to allocate, possibly due to parallel allocation activity.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
Suggested-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, compaction: pass classzone_idx and alloc_flags to watermark checking

2014-12-11T01:41:06+00:00

Compaction relies on zone watermark checks for decisions such as if it's
worth to start compacting in compaction_suitable() or whether compaction
should stop in compact_finished().  The watermark checks take
classzone_idx and alloc_flags parameters, which are related to the memory
allocation request.  But from the context of compaction they are currently
passed as 0, including the direct compaction which is invoked to satisfy
the allocation request, and could therefore know the proper values.

The lack of proper values can lead to mismatch between decisions taken
during compaction and decisions related to the allocation request.  Lack
of proper classzone_idx value means that lowmem_reserve is not taken into
account.  This has manifested (during recent changes to deferred
compaction) when DMA zone was used as fallback for preferred Normal zone.
compaction_suitable() without proper classzone_idx would think that the
watermarks are already satisfied, but watermark check in
get_page_from_freelist() would fail.  Because of this problem, deferring
compaction has extra complexity that can be removed in the following
patch.

The issue (not confirmed in practice) with missing alloc_flags is opposite
in nature.  For allocations that include ALLOC_HIGH, ALLOC_HIGHER or
ALLOC_CMA in alloc_flags (the last includes all MOVABLE allocations on
CMA-enabled systems) the watermark checking in compaction with 0 passed
will be stricter than in get_page_from_freelist().  In these cases
compaction might be running for a longer time than is really needed.

Another issue compaction_suitable() is that the check for "does the zone
need compaction at all?" comes only after the check "does the zone have
enough free free pages to succeed compaction".  The latter considers extra
pages for migration and can therefore in some situations fail and return
COMPACT_SKIPPED, although the high-order allocation would succeed and we
should return COMPACT_PARTIAL.

This patch fixes these problems by adding alloc_flags and classzone_idx to
struct compact_control and related functions involved in direct compaction
and watermark checking.  Where possible, all other callers of
compaction_suitable() pass proper values where those are known.  This is
currently limited to classzone_idx, which is sometimes known in kswapd
context.  However, the direct reclaim callers should_continue_reclaim()
and compaction_ready() do not currently know the proper values, so the
coordination between reclaim and compaction may still not be as accurate
as it could.  This can be fixed later, if it's shown to be an issue.

Additionaly the checks in compact_suitable() are reordered to address the
second issue described above.

The effect of this patch should be slightly better high-order allocation
success rates and/or less compaction overhead, depending on the type of
allocations and presence of CMA.  It allows simplifying deferred
compaction code in a followup patch.

When testing with stress-highalloc, there was some slight improvement
(which might be just due to variance) in success rates of non-THP-like
allocations.

Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, compaction: khugepaged should not give up due to need_resched()

2014-10-10T02:25:54+00:00

Async compaction aborts when it detects zone lock contention or
need_resched() is true.  David Rientjes has reported that in practice,
most direct async compactions for THP allocation abort due to
need_resched().  This means that a second direct compaction is never
attempted, which might be OK for a page fault, but khugepaged is intended
to attempt a sync compaction in such case and in these cases it won't.

This patch replaces "bool contended" in compact_control with an int that
distinguishes between aborting due to need_resched() and aborting due to
lock contention.  This allows propagating the abort through all compaction
functions as before, but passing the abort reason up to
__alloc_pages_slowpath() which decides when to continue with direct
reclaim and another compaction attempt.

Another problem is that try_to_compact_pages() did not act upon the
reported contention (both need_resched() or lock contention) immediately
and would proceed with another zone from the zonelist.  When
need_resched() is true, that means initializing another zone compaction,
only to check again need_resched() in isolate_migratepages() and aborting.
 For zone lock contention, the unintended consequence is that the lock
contended status reported back to the allocator is detrmined from the last
zone where compaction was attempted, which is rather arbitrary.

This patch fixes the problem in the following way:
- async compaction of a zone aborting due to need_resched() or fatal signal
  pending means that further zones should not be tried. We report
  COMPACT_CONTENDED_SCHED to the allocator.
- aborting zone compaction due to lock contention means we can still try
  another zone, since it has different set of locks. We report back
  COMPACT_CONTENDED_LOCK only if *all* zones where compaction was attempted,
  it was aborted due to lock contention.

As a result of these fixes, khugepaged will proceed with second sync
compaction as intended, when the preceding async compaction aborted due to
need_resched().  Page fault compactions aborting due to need_resched()
will spare some cycles previously wasted by initializing another zone
compaction only to abort again.  Lock contention will be reported only
when compaction in all zones aborted due to lock contention, and therefore
it's not a good idea to try again after reclaim.

In stress-highalloc from mmtests configured to use __GFP_NO_KSWAPD, this
has improved number of THP collapse allocations by 10%, which shows
positive effect on khugepaged.  The benchmark's success rates are
unchanged as it is not recognized as khugepaged.  Numbers of compact_stall
and compact_fail events have however decreased by 20%, with
compact_success still a bit improved, which is good.  With benchmark
configured not to use __GFP_NO_KSWAPD, there is 6% improvement in THP
collapse allocations, and only slight improvement in stalls and failures.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix warnings]
Reported-by: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, compaction: defer each zone individually instead of preferred zone

2014-10-10T02:25:53+00:00

When direct sync compaction is often unsuccessful, it may become deferred
for some time to avoid further useless attempts, both sync and async.
Successful high-order allocations un-defer compaction, while further
unsuccessful compaction attempts prolong the compaction deferred period.

Currently the checking and setting deferred status is performed only on
the preferred zone of the allocation that invoked direct compaction.  But
compaction itself is attempted on all eligible zones in the zonelist, so
the behavior is suboptimal and may lead both to scenarios where 1)
compaction is attempted uselessly, or 2) where it's not attempted despite
good chances of succeeding, as shown on the examples below:

1) A direct compaction with Normal preferred zone failed and set
   deferred compaction for the Normal zone.  Another unrelated direct
   compaction with DMA32 as preferred zone will attempt to compact DMA32
   zone even though the first compaction attempt also included DMA32 zone.

   In another scenario, compaction with Normal preferred zone failed to
   compact Normal zone, but succeeded in the DMA32 zone, so it will not
   defer compaction.  In the next attempt, it will try Normal zone which
   will fail again, instead of skipping Normal zone and trying DMA32
   directly.

2) Kswapd will balance DMA32 zone and reset defer status based on
   watermarks looking good.  A direct compaction with preferred Normal
   zone will skip compaction of all zones including DMA32 because Normal
   was still deferred.  The allocation might have succeeded in DMA32, but
   won't.

This patch makes compaction deferring work on individual zone basis
instead of preferred zone.  For each zone, it checks compaction_deferred()
to decide if the zone should be skipped.  If watermarks fail after
compacting the zone, defer_compaction() is called.  The zone where
watermarks passed can still be deferred when the allocation attempt is
unsuccessful.  When allocation is successful, compaction_defer_reset() is
called for the zone containing the allocated page.  This approach should
approximate calling defer_compaction() only on zones where compaction was
attempted and did not yield allocated page.  There might be corner cases
but that is inevitable as long as the decision to stop compacting dues not
guarantee that a page will be allocated.

Due to a new COMPACT_DEFERRED return value, some functions relying
implicitly on COMPACT_SKIPPED = 0 had to be updated, with comments made
more accurate.  The did_some_progress output parameter of
__alloc_pages_direct_compact() is removed completely, as the caller
actually does not use it after compaction sets it - it is only considered
when direct reclaim sets it.

During testing on a two-node machine with a single very small Normal zone
on node 1, this patch has improved success rates in stress-highalloc
mmtests benchmark.  The success here were previously made worse by commit
3a025760fc15 ("mm: page_alloc: spill to remote nodes before waking
kswapd") as kswapd was no longer resetting often enough the deferred
compaction for the Normal zone, and DMA32 zones on both nodes were thus
not considered for compaction.  On different machine, success rates were
improved with __GFP_NO_KSWAPD allocations.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix CONFIG_COMPACTION=n build]
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Acked-by: Minchan Kim 
Reviewed-by: Zhang Yanfei 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, compaction: embed migration mode in compact_control

2014-06-04T23:54:06+00:00

We're going to want to manipulate the migration mode for compaction in the
page allocator, and currently compact_control's sync field is only a bool.

Currently, we only do MIGRATE_ASYNC or MIGRATE_SYNC_LIGHT compaction
depending on the value of this bool.  Convert the bool to enum
migrate_mode and pass the migration mode in directly.  Later, we'll want
to avoid MIGRATE_SYNC_LIGHT for thp allocations in the pagefault patch to
avoid unnecessary latency.

This also alters compaction triggered from sysfs, either for the entire
system or for a node, to force MIGRATE_SYNC.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
[iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com: use MIGRATE_SYNC in alloc_contig_range()]
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes 
Suggested-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Greg Thelen 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: encapsulate defer reset logic

2014-01-22T00:19:48+00:00

Currently there are several functions to manipulate the deferred
compaction state variables.  The remaining case where the variables are
touched directly is when a successful allocation occurs in direct
compaction, or is expected to be successful in the future by kswapd.
Here, the lowest order that is expected to fail is updated, and in the
case of successful allocation, the deferred status and counter is reset
completely.

Create a new function compaction_defer_reset() to encapsulate this
functionality and make it easier to understand the code.  No functional
change.

Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: make __compact_pgdat() and compact_pgdat() return void

2013-02-24T01:50:10+00:00

These functions always return 0.  Formalise this.

Cc: Jason Liu 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Acked-by: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: Partially revert capture of suitable high-order page

2013-01-11T17:02:00+00:00

Eric Wong reported on 3.7 and 3.8-rc2 that ppoll() got stuck when
waiting for POLLIN on a local TCP socket.  It was easier to trigger if
there was disk IO and dirty pages at the same time and he bisected it to
commit 1fb3f8ca0e92 ("mm: compaction: capture a suitable high-order page
immediately when it is made available").

The intention of that patch was to improve high-order allocations under
memory pressure after changes made to reclaim in 3.6 drastically hurt
THP allocations but the approach was flawed.  For Eric, the problem was
that page->pfmemalloc was not being cleared for captured pages leading
to a poor interaction with swap-over-NFS support causing the packets to
be dropped.  However, I identified a few more problems with the patch
including the fact that it can increase contention on zone->lock in some
cases which could result in async direct compaction being aborted early.

In retrospect the capture patch took the wrong approach.  What it should
have done is mark the pageblock being migrated as MIGRATE_ISOLATE if it
was allocating for THP and avoided races that way.  While the patch was
showing to improve allocation success rates at the time, the benefit is
marginal given the relative complexity and it should be revisited from
scratch in the context of the other reclaim-related changes that have
taken place since the patch was first written and tested.  This patch
partially reverts commit 1fb3f8ca "mm: compaction: capture a suitable
high-order page immediately when it is made available".

Reported-and-tested-by: Eric Wong 
Tested-by: Eric Dumazet 
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: clear PG_migrate_skip based on compaction and reclaim activity

2012-10-09T07:22:51+00:00

Compaction caches if a pageblock was scanned and no pages were isolated so
that the pageblocks can be skipped in the future to reduce scanning.  This
information is not cleared by the page allocator based on activity due to
the impact it would have to the page allocator fast paths.  Hence there is
a requirement that something clear the cache or pageblocks will be skipped
forever.  Currently the cache is cleared if there were a number of recent
allocation failures and it has not been cleared within the last 5 seconds.
Time-based decisions like this are terrible as they have no relationship
to VM activity and is basically a big hammer.

Unfortunately, accurate heuristics would add cost to some hot paths so
this patch implements a rough heuristic.  There are two cases where the
cache is cleared.

1. If a !kswapd process completes a compaction cycle (migrate and free
   scanner meet), the zone is marked compact_blockskip_flush. When kswapd
   goes to sleep, it will clear the cache. This is expected to be the
   common case where the cache is cleared. It does not really matter if
   kswapd happens to be asleep or going to sleep when the flag is set as
   it will be woken on the next allocation request.

2. If there have been multiple failures recently and compaction just
   finished being deferred then a process will clear the cache and start a
   full scan.  This situation happens if there are multiple high-order
   allocation requests under heavy memory pressure.

The clearing of the PG_migrate_skip bits and other scans is inherently
racy but the race is harmless.  For allocations that can fail such as THP,
they will simply fail.  For requests that cannot fail, they will retry the
allocation.  Tests indicated that scanning rates were roughly similar to
when the time-based heuristic was used and the allocation success rates
were similar.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Richard Davies 
Cc: Shaohua Li 
Cc: Avi Kivity 
Cc: Rafael Aquini 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: capture a suitable high-order page immediately when it is made available

2012-10-09T07:22:21+00:00

While compaction is migrating pages to free up large contiguous blocks
for allocation it races with other allocation requests that may steal
these blocks or break them up.  This patch alters direct compaction to
capture a suitable free page as soon as it becomes available to reduce
this race.  It uses similar logic to split_free_page() to ensure that
watermarks are still obeyed.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds