Re: [PATCH RFC 2/4] mm/page_alloc: place pages to tail in __putback_isolated_page()

Oscar Salvador
2020-09-25T13:33:46Z

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 08:34:09PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> __putback_isolated_page() already documents that pages will be placed to
> the tail of the freelist - this is, however, not the case for
> "order >= MAX_ORDER - 2" (see buddy_merge_likely()) - which should be
> the case for all existing users.
>
> This change affects two users:
> - free page reporting
> - page isolation, when undoing the isolation.
>
> This behavior is desireable for pages that haven't really been touched
> lately, so exactly the two users that don't actually read/write page
> content, but rather move untouched pages.
>
> The new behavior is especially desirable for memory onlining, where we
> allow allocation of newly onlined pages via undo_isolate_page_range()
> in online_pages(). Right now, we always place them to the head of the
> free list, resulting in undesireable behavior: Assume we add
> individual memory chunks via add_memory() and online them right away to
> the NORMAL zone. We create a dependency chain of unmovable allocations
> e.g., via the memmap. The memmap of the next chunk will be placed onto
> previous chunks - if the last block cannot get offlined+removed, all
> dependent ones cannot get offlined+removed. While this can already be
> observed with individual DIMMs, it's more of an issue for virtio-mem
> (and I suspect also ppc DLPAR).
>
> Note: If we observe a degradation due to the changed page isolation
> behavior (which I doubt), we can always make this configurable by the
> instance triggering undo of isolation (e.g., alloc_contig_range(),
> memory onlining, memory offlining).
>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
> Cc: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com>
> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
> Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
> Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
> Cc: Wei Yang <richard.weiyang@linux.alibaba.com>
> Cc: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>
> Cc: Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org>
> Cc: Scott Cheloha <cheloha@linux.ibm.com>
> Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
> Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>

LGTM, the only thing is the shuffe_zone topic that Wei and Vlastimil rose.
Feels a bit odd that takes precedence over something we explicitily demanded.

With the comment Vlastimil suggested:

Reviewed-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>

--
Oscar Salvador
SUSE L3