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

David Hildenbrand
2020-09-25T13:30:46Z

On 25.09.20 15:19, Oscar Salvador wrote:
> 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.
>

Thanks, yeah I'll be changing that.

> With the comment Vlastimil suggested:
>
> Reviewed-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@suse.de>
>

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb