RE: [PATCH 5/5] Light fragmentation avoidance without usemap: 005_drainpercpu

[Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Seth, Rohit wrote:

> From:  Mel Gorman Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 11:18 AM
>
> >Per-cpu pages can accidentally cause fragmentation because they are
> free, >but
> >pinned pages in an otherwise contiguous block.  When this patch is
> applied,
> >the per-cpu caches are drained after the direct-reclaim is entered if
> the
>
> I don't think this is the right place to drain the pcp.  Since direct
> reclaim is already done, so it is possible that allocator can service
> the request without draining the pcps.
>

ok, true. A check should be made to see if it's possible yet and if not,
then drain. A more appropriate place might be after this block

                if (page)
                        goto got_pg;

>
> >requested order is greater than 3.
>
> Why this order limit.  Most of the previous failures seen (because of my
> earlier patches of bigger and more physical contiguous chunks for pcps)
> were with order 1 allocation.
>

The order 3 is because of this block;

        if (!(gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY)) {
                if ((order <= 3) || (gfp_mask & __GFP_REPEAT))
                        do_retry = 1;
                if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NOFAIL)
                        do_retry = 1;
        }

If it's less than 3, we are retrying anyway and it's something we are
already doing. If it was felt it had a chance of working before, I felt
that draining per-cpu caches was unnecessary.

> >It simply reuses the code used by suspend
> >and hotplug and only is triggered when anti-defragmentation is enabled.
> >
> That code has issues with pre-emptible kernel.
>

ok... why? I thought that we could only be preempted when we were about to
take a spinlock but I have an imperfect understanding of preempt and
things change quickly. The path the drain_all_local_pages() enters
disables the local IRQs before calling __drain_pages() and when
smp_drain_local_pages()  is called, the local IRQs are disabled again
before releasing pages. Where can we get preempted?

> I will be shortly sending the patch to free pages from pcp when higher
> order allocation is not able to get serviced from global list.
>

If that works, this part of the patch can be dropped. The intention is to
"drain the per-cpu lists by some mechanism". I am not too particular about
how it happens. Right now, the per-cpu caches make a massive difference on
my 4-way machine at least on whether a large number of contiguous blocks
can be allocated or not.

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Java Applications Developer
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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