[patch v3 5/6] mm, thp: avoid excessive compaction latency during fault

David Rientjes
2014-05-07T02:23:43Z

Synchronous memory compaction can be very expensive: it can iterate an enormous
amount of memory without aborting, constantly rescheduling, waiting on page
locks and lru_lock, etc, if a pageblock cannot be defragmented.

Unfortunately, it's too expensive for transparent hugepage page faults and
it's much better to simply fallback to pages. On 128GB machines, we find that
synchronous memory compaction can take O(seconds) for a single thp fault.

Now that async compaction remembers where it left off without strictly relying
on sync compaction, this makes thp allocations best-effort without causing
egregious latency during fault. We still need to retry async compaction after
reclaim, but this won't stall for seconds.

Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
---
mm/page_alloc.c | 12 +++++++++++-
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -2584,7 +2584,17 @@ rebalance:
&did_some_progress);
if (page)
goto got_pg;
- migration_mode = MIGRATE_SYNC_LIGHT;
+
+ if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NO_KSWAPD) {
+ /*
+ * Khugepaged is allowed to try MIGRATE_SYNC_LIGHT, the latency
+ * of this allocation isn't critical. Everything else, however,
+ * should only be allowed to do MIGRATE_ASYNC to avoid excessive
+ * stalls during fault.
+ */
+ if ((current->flags & (PF_KTHREAD | PF_KSWAPD)) == PF_KTHREAD)
+ migration_mode = MIGRATE_SYNC_LIGHT;
+ }

/*
* If compaction is deferred for high-order allocations, it is because