When allocation falls back to another migratetype, it will steal a page
with highest available order, and (depending on this order and desired
migratetype), it might also steal the rest of free pages from the same
pageblock.
Given the preference of highest available order, it is likely that it will
be higher than the desired order, and result in the stolen buddy page
being split. The remaining pages after split are currently stolen only
when the rest of the free pages are stolen. This can however lead to
situations where for MOVABLE allocations we split e.g. order-4 fallback
UNMOVABLE page, but steal only order-0 page. Then on the next MOVABLE
allocation (which may be batched to fill the pcplists) we split another
order-3 or higher page, etc. By stealing all pages that we have split, we
can avoid further stealing.
This patch therefore adjusts the page stealing so that buddy pages created
by split are always stolen. This has effect only on MOVABLE allocations,
as RECLAIMABLE and UNMOVABLE allocations already always do that in
addition to stealing the rest of free pages from the pageblock. The
change also allows to simplify try_to_steal_freepages() and factor out CMA
handling.
According to Mel, it has been intended since the beginning that buddy
pages after split would be stolen always, but it doesn't seem like it was
ever the case until commit 47118af076 ("mm: mmzone: MIGRATE_CMA
migration type added"). The commit has unintentionally introduced this
behavior, but was reverted by commit 0cbef29a78 ("mm:
__rmqueue_fallback() should respect pageblock type"). Neither included
evaluation.
My evaluation with stress-highalloc from mmtests shows about 2.5x
reduction of page stealing events for MOVABLE allocations, without
affecting the page stealing events for other allocation migratetypes.
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Zhang Yanfei <zhangyanfei@cn.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K.V" <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>