linux-toradex.git/include/linux/compaction.h, branch v4.1

mm: allow compaction of unevictable pages

2015-04-15T23:35:17+00:00

Currently, pages which are marked as unevictable are protected from
compaction, but not from other types of migration.  The POSIX real time
extension explicitly states that mlock() will prevent a major page
fault, but the spirit of this is that mlock() should give a process the
ability to control sources of latency, including minor page faults.
However, the mlock manpage only explicitly says that a locked page will
not be written to swap and this can cause some confusion.  The
compaction code today does not give a developer who wants to avoid swap
but wants to have large contiguous areas available any method to achieve
this state.  This patch introduces a sysctl for controlling compaction
behavior with respect to the unevictable lru.  Users who demand no page
faults after a page is present can set compact_unevictable_allowed to 0
and users who need the large contiguous areas can enable compaction on
locked memory by leaving the default value of 1.

To illustrate this problem I wrote a quick test program that mmaps a
large number of 1MB files filled with random data.  These maps are
created locked and read only.  Then every other mmap is unmapped and I
attempt to allocate huge pages to the static huge page pool.  When the
compact_unevictable_allowed sysctl is 0, I cannot allocate hugepages
after fragmenting memory.  When the value is set to 1, allocations
succeed.

Signed-off-by: Eric B Munson 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter 
Acked-by: David Rientjes 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Thomas Gleixner 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Peter Zijlstra 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/compaction: add tracepoint to observe behaviour of compaction defer

2015-02-12T01:06:04+00:00

Compaction deferring logic is heavy hammer that block the way to the
compaction.  It doesn't consider overall system state, so it could prevent
user from doing compaction falsely.  In other words, even if system has
enough range of memory to compact, compaction would be skipped due to
compaction deferring logic.  This patch add new tracepoint to understand
work of deferring logic.  This will also help to check compaction success
and fail.

Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Cc: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/compaction: more trace to understand when/why compaction start/finish

2015-02-12T01:06:04+00:00

It is not well analyzed that when/why compaction start/finish or not.
With these new tracepoints, we can know much more about start/finish
reason of compaction.  I can find following bug with these tracepoint.

http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg81582.html

Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Cc: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/compaction: enhance tracepoint output for compaction begin/end

2015-02-12T01:06:04+00:00

We now have tracepoint for begin event of compaction and it prints start
position of both scanners, but, tracepoint for end event of compaction
doesn't print finish position of both scanners.  It'd be also useful to
know finish position of both scanners so this patch add it.  It will help
to find odd behavior or problem on compaction internal logic.

And mode is added to both begin/end tracepoint output, since according to
mode, compaction behavior is quite different.

And lastly, status format is changed to string rather than status number
for readability.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix sparse warning]
Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Dan Carpenter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: reduce try_to_compact_pages parameters

2015-02-12T01:06:02+00:00

Expand the usage of the struct alloc_context introduced in the previous
patch also for calling try_to_compact_pages(), to reduce the number of its
parameters.  Since the function is in different compilation unit, we need
to move alloc_context definition in the shared mm/internal.h header.

With this change we get simpler code and small savings of code size and stack
usage:

add/remove: 0/0 grow/shrink: 0/1 up/down: 0/-27 (-27)
function                                     old     new   delta
__alloc_pages_direct_compact                 283     256     -27
add/remove: 0/0 grow/shrink: 0/1 up/down: 0/-13 (-13)
function                                     old     new   delta
try_to_compact_pages                         582     569     -13

Stack usage of __alloc_pages_direct_compact goes from 24 to none (per
scripts/checkstack.pl).

Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Zhang Yanfei 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" 
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Joonsoo Kim 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

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