Re: [PATCH v1] mm: consider non-anonymous thp as unmovable page

[Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2018 at 09:59:28AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 03-04-18 13:46:28, Naoya Horiguchi wrote:
> > My testing for the latest kernel supporting thp migration found out an
> > infinite loop in offlining the memory block that is filled with shmem
> > thps.  We can get out of the loop with a signal, but kernel should
> > return with failure in this case.
> >
> > What happens in the loop is that scan_movable_pages() repeats returning
> > the same pfn without any progress. That's because page migration always
> > fails for shmem thps.
>
> Why does it fail? Shmem pages should be movable without any issues.

.. because try_to_unmap_one() explicitly skips unmapping for migration.

  #ifdef CONFIG_ARCH_ENABLE_THP_MIGRATION
                  /* PMD-mapped THP migration entry */
                  if (!pvmw.pte && (flags & TTU_MIGRATION)) {
                          VM_BUG_ON_PAGE(PageHuge(page) || !PageTransCompound(page), page);
  
                          if (!PageAnon(page))
                                  continue;
  
                          set_pmd_migration_entry(&pvmw, page);
                          continue;
                  }
  #endif

When I implemented this code, I felt hard to work on both of anon thp
and shmem thp at one time, so I separated the proposal into smaller steps.
Shmem uses pagecache so we need some non-trivial effort (including testing)
to extend thp migration for shmem. But I think it's a reasonable next step.

Thanks,
Naoya Horiguchi