Re: [PATCH v2] mm/page_alloc: call check_new_pages() while zone spinlock is not held

[Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 1:15 AM Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 09:02:15AM -0800, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> > From: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
> >
> > For high order pages not using pcp, rmqueue() is currently calling
> > the costly check_new_pages() while zone spinlock is held,
> > and hard irqs masked.
> >
> > This is not needed, we can release the spinlock sooner to reduce
> > zone spinlock contention.
> >
> > Note that after this patch, we call __mod_zone_freepage_state()
> > before deciding to leak the page because it is in bad state.
> >
> > v2: We need to keep interrupts disabled to call __mod_zone_freepage_state()
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
> > Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
> > Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
> > Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
> > Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
> > Cc: Wei Xu <weixugc@google.com>
> > Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
> > Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
> > Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
>
> Ok, this is only more expensive in the event pages on the free list have
> been corrupted whch is already very unlikely so thanks!
>
> Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
>

One remaining question is:

After your patch ("mm/page_alloc: allow high-order pages to be stored
on the per-cpu lists"),
do we want to change check_pcp_refill()/check_new_pcp() to check all pages,
and not only the head ?

Or was it a conscious choice of yours ?
(I presume part of the performance gains came from
not having to bring ~7 cache lines per 32KB chunk on x86)

Thanks !