The patch titled Subject: mm: do not boost watermarks to avoid fragmentation for the DISCONTIG memory model has been added to the -mm tree. Its filename is mm-do-not-boost-watermarks-to-avoid-fragmentation-for-the-discontig-memory-model.patch

This patch should soon appear at http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmots/broken-out/mm-do-not-boost-watermarks-to-avoid... and later at http://ozlabs.org/~akpm/mmotm/broken-out/mm-do-not-boost-watermarks-to-avoid...

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------------------------------------------------------ From: Mel Gorman mgorman@techsingularity.net Subject: mm: do not boost watermarks to avoid fragmentation for the DISCONTIG memory model

Mikulas Patocka reported that 1c30844d2dfe ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs") "broke" memory management on parisc. The machine is not NUMA but the DISCONTIG model creates three pgdats even though it's a UMA machine for the following ranges

0) Start 0x0000000000000000 End 0x000000003fffffff Size 1024 MB 1) Start 0x0000000100000000 End 0x00000001bfdfffff Size 3070 MB 2) Start 0x0000004040000000 End 0x00000040ffffffff Size 3072 MB

Mikulas reported:

With the patch 1c30844d2, the kernel will incorrectly reclaim the first zone when it fills up, ignoring the fact that there are two completely free zones. Basiscally, it limits cache size to 1GiB.

For example, if I run: # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M count=2048

- with the proper kernel, there should be "Buffers - 2GiB" when this command finishes. With the patch 1c30844d2, buffers will consume just 1GiB or slightly more, because the kernel was incorrectly reclaiming them.

The page allocator and reclaim makes assumptions that pgdats really represent NUMA nodes and zones represent ranges and makes decisions on that basis. Watermark boosting for small pgdats leads to unexpected results even though this would have behaved reasonably on SPARSEMEM.

DISCONTIG is essentially deprecated and even parisc plans to move to SPARSEMEM so there is no need to be fancy, this patch simply disables watermark boosting by default on DISCONTIGMEM.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190419094335.GJ18914@techsingularity.net Fixes: 1c30844d2dfe ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs") Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman mgorman@techsingularity.net Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka mpatocka@redhat.com Tested-by: Mikulas Patocka mpatocka@redhat.com Cc: James Bottomley James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com Cc: Vlastimil Babka vbabka@suse.cz Cc: Matthew Wilcox willy@infradead.org Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton akpm@linux-foundation.org ---

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt | 16 ++++++++-------- mm/page_alloc.c | 13 +++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 21 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt~mm-do-not-boost-watermarks-to-avoid-fragmentation-for-the-discontig-memory-model +++ a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt @@ -866,14 +866,14 @@ The intent is that compaction has less w increase the success rate of future high-order allocations such as SLUB allocations, THP and hugetlbfs pages.

-To make it sensible with respect to the watermark_scale_factor parameter, -the unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of 15,000 means -that up to 150% of the high watermark will be reclaimed in the event of -a pageblock being mixed due to fragmentation. The level of reclaim is -determined by the number of fragmentation events that occurred in the -recent past. If this value is smaller than a pageblock then a pageblocks -worth of pages will be reclaimed (e.g. 2MB on 64-bit x86). A boost factor -of 0 will disable the feature. +To make it sensible with respect to the watermark_scale_factor +parameter, the unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of +15,000 on !DISCONTIGMEM configurations means that up to 150% of the high +watermark will be reclaimed in the event of a pageblock being mixed due +to fragmentation. The level of reclaim is determined by the number of +fragmentation events that occurred in the recent past. If this value is +smaller than a pageblock then a pageblocks worth of pages will be reclaimed +(e.g. 2MB on 64-bit x86). A boost factor of 0 will disable the feature.

=============================================================

--- a/mm/page_alloc.c~mm-do-not-boost-watermarks-to-avoid-fragmentation-for-the-discontig-memory-model +++ a/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -266,7 +266,20 @@ compound_page_dtor * const compound_page

int min_free_kbytes = 1024; int user_min_free_kbytes = -1; +#ifdef CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM +/* + * DiscontigMem defines memory ranges as separate pg_data_t even if the ranges + * are not on separate NUMA nodes. Functionally this works but with + * watermark_boost_factor, it can reclaim prematurely as the ranges can be + * quite small. By default, do not boost watermarks on discontigmem as in + * many cases very high-order allocations like THP are likely to be + * unsupported and the premature reclaim offsets the advantage of long-term + * fragmentation avoidance. + */ +int watermark_boost_factor __read_mostly; +#else int watermark_boost_factor __read_mostly = 15000; +#endif int watermark_scale_factor = 10;

static unsigned long nr_kernel_pages __initdata; _

Patches currently in -mm which might be from mgorman@techsingularity.net are

mm-do-not-boost-watermarks-to-avoid-fragmentation-for-the-discontig-memory-model.patch