Re: Page allocator: Single Zone optimizations

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

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Nov 2006 18:26:05 +0000
> mel@skynet.ie (Mel Gorman) wrote:
>
>> I never really got this objection. With list-based anti-frag, the
>> zone-balancing logic remains the same. There are patches from Andy
>> Whitcroft that reclaims pages in contiguous blocks, but still with the same
>> zone-ordering. It doesn't affect load balancing between zones as such.
>
> I do believe that lumpy-reclaim (initiated by Andy, redone and prototyped
> by Peter, cruelly abandoned) is a perferable approach to solving the
> fragmentation approach.
>

On it's own lumpy-reclaim or linear-reclaim were not enough to get 
MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES blocks of contiguous pages and these were of interest 
for huge pages although not necessarily of much use to memory hot-unplug. 
Tests with linear reclaim and lumpy reclaim showed them to be marginally 
(very marginal) better than just using the standard allocator and standard 
reclaim. The clustering by reclaim type (or having a separate zone) was 
still needed.

> And with __GFP_EASYRECLAIM (please - I just renamed it ;))

Sure.

> (or using
> __GFP_HIGHMEM for the same thing)

>From a fragmentation perspective, __GFP_HIGHUSER on it's own was not 
enough. Block device pages for example or pages allocated by submit_bh() 
are largely reclaimable but not allocated with __GFP_HIGHUSER.

> then some of the core lumpy-reclaim algorithm can be reused for hot-unplug.
>
> If you want to unplug a range of memory then it has to be in a zone which
> is 100% __GFP_EASY_RECLAIM (actually the name is still wrong.  It should
> just be __GFP_RECLAIMABLE).
>

The "EASY" was in the title becauseI named kernel allocations that were 
short-lived or belonging to caches KERNRCLM or KERNEL_RECLAIMABLE now I 
suppose. It made a difference to how effective list-based anti-frag was 
under pressure.

> The hot-unplug code will go through those pages and it will, with 100%
> reliability, rip those pages out of the kernel via various means.  I think
> this can all be done.
>

The unplug code used to exist and I recall being able to offline memory 
and bring it back online again.

> And hot-unplug isn't actually the interesting application.  Modern Intel
> memory controllers apparently have (or will have) the ability to power down
> DIMMs.
>

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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