Re: [PATCH] Revert "mm, hugetlb: remove hugepages_treat_as_movable sysctl"

Michal Hocko
2025-10-08T14:59:11Z

On Wed 08-10-25 10:58:23, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 07.10.25 23:44, Gregory Price wrote:
[...]
> > @@ -926,7 +927,8 @@ static inline gfp_t htlb_alloc_mask(struct hstate *h)
> > {
> > gfp_t gfp = __GFP_COMP | __GFP_NOWARN;
> > - gfp |= hugepage_movable_supported(h) ? GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE : GFP_HIGHUSER;
> > + gfp |= (hugepage_movable_supported(h) || hugepages_treat_as_movable) ?
> > + GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE : GFP_HIGHUSER;
>
> I mean, this is as ugly as it gets.
>
> Can't we just let that old approach RIP where it belongs? :)
>
> If something unmovable, it does not belong on ZONE_MOVABLE, as simple as that.

yes, I do agree. This is just muddying the semantic of the zone.

Maybe what we really want is to have a configurable zone rather than a
very specific consumer of it instead. What do I mean by that? We clearly
have physically (DMA, DMA32) and usability (NORMAL, MOVABLE) constrained
zones. So rather than having a MOVABLE zone we can have a single zone
$FOO_NAME zone with configurable attributes - like allocation
constrains (kernel, user, movable, etc). Now that we can overlap zones
this should allow for quite a lot flexibility. Implementation wise this
would require some tricks as we have 2 zone types for potentially 3
different major usecases (kernel allocations, userspace reserved ranges
without movability and movable allocations). I haven't thought this
through completely and mostly throwing this as an idea (maybe won't
work). Does that make sense?
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs