[PATCH 5/6] mm, compaction: skip compound pages by order in free scanner

Vlastimil Babka
2015-06-10T09:35:00Z

The compaction free scanner is looking for PageBuddy() pages and skipping all
others. For large compound pages such as THP or hugetlbfs, we can save a lot
of iterations if we skip them at once using their compound_order(). This is
generally unsafe and we can read a bogus value of order due to a race, but if
we are careful, the only danger is skipping too much.

When tested with stress-highalloc from mmtests on 4GB system with 1GB hugetlbfs
pages, the vmstat compact_free_scanned count decreased by at least 15%.

Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@mina86.com>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
---
mm/compaction.c | 25 +++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 25 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/compaction.c b/mm/compaction.c
index e37d361..4a14084 100644
--- a/mm/compaction.c
+++ b/mm/compaction.c
@@ -437,6 +437,24 @@ static unsigned long isolate_freepages_block(struct compact_control *cc,

if (!valid_page)
valid_page = page;
+
+ /*
+ * For compound pages such as THP and hugetlbfs, we can save
+ * potentially a lot of iterations if we skip them at once.
+ * The check is racy, but we can consider only valid values
+ * and the only danger is skipping too much.
+ */
+ if (PageCompound(page)) {
+ unsigned int comp_order = compound_order(page);
+
+ if (comp_order > 0 && comp_order < MAX_ORDER) {
+ blockpfn += (1UL << comp_order) - 1;
+ cursor += (1UL << comp_order) - 1;
+ }
+
+ goto isolate_fail;
+ }
+
if (!PageBuddy(page))
goto isolate_fail;

@@ -496,6 +514,13 @@ isolate_fail:

}

+ /*
+ * There is a tiny chance that we have read bogus compound_order(),
+ * so be careful to not go outside of the pageblock.
+ */
+ if (unlikely(blockpfn > end_pfn))
+ blockpfn = end_pfn;
+
trace_mm_compaction_isolate_freepages(*start_pfn, blockpfn,
nr_scanned, total_isolated);

--
2.1.4