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Mel Gorman authored
Commit 7db8889a ("mm: have order > 0 compaction start off where it left") introduced a caching mechanism to reduce the amount work the free page scanner does in compaction. However, it has a problem. Consider two process simultaneously scanning free pages C Process A M S F |---------------------------------------| Process B M FS C is zone->compact_cached_free_pfn S is cc->start_pfree_pfn M is cc->migrate_pfn F is cc->free_pfn In this diagram, Process A has just reached its migrate scanner, wrapped around and updated compact_cached_free_pfn accordingly. Simultaneously, Process B finishes isolating in a block and updates compact_cached_free_pfn again to the location of its free scanner. Process A moves to "end_of_zone - one_pageblock" and runs this check if (cc->order > 0 && (!cc->wrapped || zone->compact_cached_free_pfn > cc->start_free_pfn)) pfn = min(pfn, zone->compact_cached_free_pfn); compact_cached_free_pfn is above where it started so the free scanner skips almost the entire space it should have scanned. When there are multiple processes compacting it can end in a situation where the entire zone is not being scanned at all. Further, it is possible for two processes to ping-pong update to compact_cached_free_pfn which is just random. Overall, the end result wrecks allocation success rates. There is not an obvious way around this problem without introducing new locking and state so this patch takes a different approach. First, it gets rid of the skip logic because it's not clear that it matters if two free scanners happen to be in the same block but with racing updates it's too easy for it to skip over blocks it should not. Second, it updates compact_cached_free_pfn in a more limited set of circumstances. If a scanner has wrapped, it updates compact_cached_free_pfn to the end of the zone. When a wrapped scanner isolates a page, it updates compact_cached_free_pfn to point to the highest pageblock it can isolate pages from. If a scanner has not wrapped when it has finished isolated pages it checks if compact_cached_free_pfn is pointing to the end of the zone. If so, the value is updated to point to the highest pageblock that pages were isolated from. This value will not be updated again until a free page scanner wraps and resets compact_cached_free_pfn. This is not optimal and it can still race but the compact_cached_free_pfn will be pointing to or very near a pageblock with free pages. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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