tree 2ffeaee2454bf0b03530c22ac23b4eb5edb4d89d
parent a2953204b576ea3ba4afd07b917811d50fc49778
parent 76e654cc91bbe627aa6067916f02a4d3ac041620
author Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1569706007 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1569706007 -0700

Merge branch 'hugepage-fallbacks' (hugepatch patches from David Rientjes)

Merge hugepage allocation updates from David Rientjes:
 "We (mostly Linus, Andrea, and myself) have been discussing offlist how
  to implement a sane default allocation strategy for hugepages on NUMA
  platforms.

  With these reverts in place, the page allocator will happily allocate
  a remote hugepage immediately rather than try to make a local hugepage
  available. This incurs a substantial performance degradation when
  memory compaction would have otherwise made a local hugepage
  available.

  This series reverts those reverts and attempts to propose a more sane
  default allocation strategy specifically for hugepages. Andrea
  acknowledges this is likely to fix the swap storms that he originally
  reported that resulted in the patches that removed __GFP_THISNODE from
  hugepage allocations.

  The immediate goal is to return 5.3 to the behavior the kernel has
  implemented over the past several years so that remote hugepages are
  not immediately allocated when local hugepages could have been made
  available because the increased access latency is untenable.

  The next goal is to introduce a sane default allocation strategy for
  hugepages allocations in general regardless of the configuration of
  the system so that we prevent thrashing of local memory when
  compaction is unlikely to succeed and can prefer remote hugepages over
  remote native pages when the local node is low on memory."

Note on timing: this reverts the hugepage VM behavior changes that got
introduced fairly late in the 5.3 cycle, and that fixed a huge
performance regression for certain loads that had been around since
4.18.

Andrea had this note:

 "The regression of 4.18 was that it was taking hours to start a VM
  where 3.10 was only taking a few seconds, I reported all the details
  on lkml when it was finally tracked down in August 2018.

     https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20180820032640.9896-2-aarcange@redhat.com/

  __GFP_THISNODE in MADV_HUGEPAGE made the above enterprise vfio
  workload degrade like in the "current upstream" above. And it still
  would have been that bad as above until 5.3-rc5"

where the bad behavior ends up happening as you fill up a local node,
and without that change, you'd get into the nasty swap storm behavior
due to compaction working overtime to make room for more memory on the
nodes.

As a result 5.3 got the two performance fix reverts in rc5.

However, David Rientjes then noted that those performance fixes in turn
regressed performance for other loads - although not quite to the same
degree.  He suggested reverting the reverts and instead replacing them
with two small changes to how hugepage allocations are done (patch
descriptions rephrased by me):

 - "avoid expensive reclaim when compaction may not succeed": just admit
   that the allocation failed when you're trying to allocate a huge-page
   and compaction wasn't successful.

 - "allow hugepage fallback to remote nodes when madvised": when that
   node-local huge-page allocation failed, retry without forcing the
   local node.

but by then I judged it too late to replace the fixes for a 5.3 release.
So 5.3 was released with behavior that harked back to the pre-4.18 logic.

But now we're in the merge window for 5.4, and we can see if this
alternate model fixes not just the horrendous swap storm behavior, but
also restores the performance regression that the late reverts caused.

Fingers crossed.

* emailed patches from David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>:
  mm, page_alloc: allow hugepage fallback to remote nodes when madvised
  mm, page_alloc: avoid expensive reclaim when compaction may not succeed
  Revert "Revert "Revert "mm, thp: consolidate THP gfp handling into alloc_hugepage_direct_gfpmask""
  Revert "Revert "mm, thp: restore node-local hugepage allocations""