Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] Aggressively allocate the pages on cma reserved memory

["Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com> writes:

> On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 02:39:20PM +0200, Marek Szyprowski wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> On 2014-05-08 02:32, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
>> >This series tries to improve CMA.
>> >
>> >CMA is introduced to provide physically contiguous pages at runtime
>> >without reserving memory area. But, current implementation works like as
>> >reserving memory approach, because allocation on cma reserved region only
>> >occurs as fallback of migrate_movable allocation. We can allocate from it
>> >when there is no movable page. In that situation, kswapd would be invoked
>> >easily since unmovable and reclaimable allocation consider
>> >(free pages - free CMA pages) as free memory on the system and free memory
>> >may be lower than high watermark in that case. If kswapd start to reclaim
>> >memory, then fallback allocation doesn't occur much.
>> >
>> >In my experiment, I found that if system memory has 1024 MB memory and
>> >has 512 MB reserved memory for CMA, kswapd is mostly invoked around
>> >the 512MB free memory boundary. And invoked kswapd tries to make free
>> >memory until (free pages - free CMA pages) is higher than high watermark,
>> >so free memory on meminfo is moving around 512MB boundary consistently.
>> >
>> >To fix this problem, we should allocate the pages on cma reserved memory
>> >more aggressively and intelligenetly. Patch 2 implements the solution.
>> >Patch 1 is the simple optimization which remove useless re-trial and patch 3
>> >is for removing useless alloc flag, so these are not important.
>> >See patch 2 for more detailed description.
>> >
>> >This patchset is based on v3.15-rc4.
>> 
>> Thanks for posting those patches. It basically reminds me the
>> following discussion:
>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1391989/focus=1399524
>> 
>> Your approach is basically the same. I hope that your patches can be
>> improved
>> in such a way that they will be accepted by mm maintainers. I only
>> wonder if the
>> third patch is really necessary. Without it kswapd wakeup might be
>> still avoided
>> in some cases.
>
> Hello,
>
> Oh... I didn't know that patch and discussion, because I have no interest
> on CMA at that time. Your approach looks similar to #1
> approach of mine and could have same problem of #1 approach which I mentioned
> in patch 2/3. Please refer that patch description. :)

IIUC that patch also interleave right ?

+#ifdef CONFIG_CMA
+	unsigned long nr_free = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES);
+	unsigned long nr_cma_free = zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_CMA_PAGES);
+
+	if (migratetype == MIGRATE_MOVABLE && nr_cma_free &&
+	    nr_free - nr_cma_free < 2 * low_wmark_pages(zone))
+		migratetype = MIGRATE_CMA;
+#endif /* CONFIG_CMA */

That doesn't always prefer CMA region. It would be nice to
understand why grouping in pageblock_nr_pages is beneficial. Also in
your patch you decrement nr_try_cma for every 'order' allocation. Why ?

+	if (zone->nr_try_cma) {
+		/* Okay. Now, we can try to allocate the page from cma region */
+		zone->nr_try_cma--;
+		page = __rmqueue_smallest(zone, order, MIGRATE_CMA);
+
+		/* CMA pages can vanish through CMA allocation */
+		if (unlikely(!page && order == 0))
+			zone->nr_try_cma = 0;
+
+		return page;
+	}


If we fail above MIGRATE_CMA alloc should we return failure ? Why
not try MOVABLE allocation on failure (ie fallthrough the code path) ?

> And, there is different purpose between this and yours. This patch is
> intended to better use of CMA pages and so get maximum performance.
> Just to not trigger oom, it can be possible to put this logic on reclaim path.
> But that is sub-optimal to get higher performance, because it needs
> migration in some cases.
>
> If second patch works as intended, there are just a few of cma free pages
> when we are toward on the watermark. So benefit of third patch would
> be marginal and we can remove ALLOC_CMA.
>
> Thanks.
>

-aneesh

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