Re: [PATCH 13/14] Do not compact within a preferred zone after acompaction failure

From: Andrea Arcangeli
Date: Tue Apr 06 2010 - 20:56:48 EST


On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 05:06:16PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > ---
> > include/linux/compaction.h | 35 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> > include/linux/mmzone.h | 7 +++++++
> > mm/page_alloc.c | 5 ++++-
> > 3 files changed, 46 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/include/linux/compaction.h b/include/linux/compaction.h
> > index ae98afc..2a02719 100644
> > --- a/include/linux/compaction.h
> > +++ b/include/linux/compaction.h
> > @@ -18,6 +18,32 @@ extern int sysctl_extfrag_handler(struct ctl_table *table, int write,
> > extern int fragmentation_index(struct zone *zone, unsigned int order);
> > extern unsigned long try_to_compact_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist,
> > int order, gfp_t gfp_mask, nodemask_t *mask);
> > +
> > +/* defer_compaction - Do not compact within a zone until a given time */
> > +static inline void defer_compaction(struct zone *zone, unsigned long resume)
> > +{
> > + /*
> > + * This function is called when compaction fails to result in a page
> > + * allocation success. This is somewhat unsatisfactory as the failure
> > + * to compact has nothing to do with time and everything to do with
> > + * the requested order, the number of free pages and watermarks. How
> > + * to wait on that is more unclear, but the answer would apply to
> > + * other areas where the VM waits based on time.
> > + */
>
> c'mon, let's not make this rod for our backs.

Actually I skipped this one in the unified tree (I'm running both
patchsets at the same time as I write this and I should have tweaked
it so that the defrag sysfs control in transparent hugepage turns
memory compaction on and off, plus I embedded the
set_recommended_min_free_kbytes() code inside huge_memory.c
initialization). I merged the whole V7 except the above. It also
didn't pass my threshold, also because this only checks 1 jiffy that
is random and too short to matter.
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