tree 8506b50f6a94923d7a4401000033e9561d5f629f
parent 13e0988140374123bead1dd27c287354cb95108e
author Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> 1494284070 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1494288909 -0700

mm, compaction: reorder fields in struct compact_control

Patch series "try to reduce fragmenting fallbacks", v3.

Last year, Johannes Weiner has reported a regression in page mobility
grouping [1] and while the exact cause was not found, I've come up with
some ways to improve it by reducing the number of allocations falling
back to different migratetype and causing permanent fragmentation.

The series was tested with mmtests stress-highalloc modified to do
GFP_KERNEL order-4 allocations, on 4.9 with "mm, vmscan: fix zone
balance check in prepare_kswapd_sleep" (without that, kcompactd indeed
wasn't woken up) on UMA machine with 4GB memory.  There were 5 repeats
of each run, as the extfrag stats are quite volatile (note the stats
below are sums, not averages, as it was less perl hacking for me).

Success rate are the same, already high due to the low allocation order
used, so I'm not including them.

Compaction stats:
(the patches are stacked, and I haven't measured the non-functional-changes
patches separately)

                                     patch 1     patch 2     patch 3     patch 4     patch 7     patch 8
  Compaction stalls                    22449       24680       24846       19765       22059       17480
  Compaction success                   12971       14836       14608       10475       11632        8757
  Compaction failures                   9477        9843       10238        9290       10426        8722
  Page migrate success               3109022     3370438     3312164     1695105     1608435     2111379
  Page migrate failure                911588     1149065     1028264     1112675     1077251     1026367
  Compaction pages isolated          7242983     8015530     7782467     4629063     4402787     5377665
  Compaction migrate scanned       980838938   987367943   957690188   917647238   947155598  1018922197
  Compaction free scanned          557926893   598946443   602236894   594024490   541169699   763651731
  Compaction cost                      10243       10578       10304        8286        8398        9440

Compaction stats are mostly within noise until patch 4, which decreases
the number of compactions, and migrations.  Part of that could be due to
more pageblocks marked as unmovable, and async compaction skipping
those.  This changes a bit with patch 7, but not so much.  Patch 8
increases free scanner stats and migrations, which comes from the
changed termination criteria.  Interestingly number of compactions
decreases - probably the fully compacted pageblock satisfies multiple
subsequent allocations, so it amortizes.

Next comes the extfrag tracepoint, where "fragmenting" means that an
allocation had to fallback to a pageblock of another migratetype which
wasn't fully free (which is almost all of the fallbacks).  I have
locally added another tracepoint for "Page steal" into
steal_suitable_fallback() which triggers in situations where we are
allowed to do move_freepages_block().  If we decide to also do
set_pageblock_migratetype(), it's "Pages steal with pageblock" with
break down for which allocation migratetype we are stealing and from
which fallback migratetype.  The last part "due to counting" comes from
patch 4 and counts the events where the counting of movable pages
allowed us to change pageblock's migratetype, while the number of free
pages alone wouldn't be enough to cross the threshold.

                                                       patch 1     patch 2     patch 3     patch 4     patch 7     patch 8
  Page alloc extfrag event                            10155066     8522968    10164959    15622080    13727068    13140319
  Extfrag fragmenting                                 10149231     8517025    10159040    15616925    13721391    13134792
  Extfrag fragmenting for unmovable                     159504      168500      184177       97835       70625       56948
  Extfrag fragmenting unmovable placed with movable     153613      163549      172693       91740       64099       50917
  Extfrag fragmenting unmovable placed with reclaim.      5891        4951       11484        6095        6526        6031
  Extfrag fragmenting for reclaimable                     4738        4829        6345        4822        5640        5378
  Extfrag fragmenting reclaimable placed with movable     1836        1902        1851        1579        1739        1760
  Extfrag fragmenting reclaimable placed with unmov.      2902        2927        4494        3243        3901        3618
  Extfrag fragmenting for movable                      9984989     8343696     9968518    15514268    13645126    13072466
  Pages steal                                           179954      192291      210880      123254       94545       81486
  Pages steal with pageblock                             22153       18943       20154       33562       29969       33444
  Pages steal with pageblock for unmovable               14350       12858       13256       20660       19003       20852
  Pages steal with pageblock for unmovable from mov.     12812       11402       11683       19072       17467       19298
  Pages steal with pageblock for unmovable from recl.     1538        1456        1573        1588        1536        1554
  Pages steal with pageblock for movable                  7114        5489        5965       11787       10012       11493
  Pages steal with pageblock for movable from unmov.      6885        5291        5541       11179        9525       10885
  Pages steal with pageblock for movable from recl.        229         198         424         608         487         608
  Pages steal with pageblock for reclaimable               689         596         933        1115         954        1099
  Pages steal with pageblock for reclaimable from unmov.   273         219         537         658         547         667
  Pages steal with pageblock for reclaimable from mov.     416         377         396         457         407         432
  Pages steal with pageblock due to counting                                                 11834       10075        7530
  ... for unmovable                                                                           8993        7381        4616
  ... for movable                                                                             2792        2653        2851
  ... for reclaimable                                                                           49          41          63

What we can see is that "Extfrag fragmenting for unmovable" and "...
placed with movable" drops with almost each patch, which is good as we
are polluting less movable pageblocks with unmovable pages.

The most significant change is patch 4 with movable page counting.  On
the other hand it increases "Extfrag fragmenting for movable" by 50%.
"Pages steal" drops though, so these movable allocation fallbacks find
only small free pages and are not allowed to steal whole pageblocks
back.  "Pages steal with pageblock" raises, because the patch increases
the chances of pageblock migratetype changes to happen.  This affects
all migratetypes.

The summary is that patch 4 is not a clear win wrt these stats, but I
believe that the tradeoff it makes is a good one.  There's less
pollution of movable pageblocks by unmovable allocations.  There's less
stealing between pageblock, and those that remain have higher chance of
changing migratetype also the pageblock itself, so it should more
faithfully reflect the migratetype of the pages within the pageblock.
The increase of movable allocations falling back to unmovable pageblock
might look dramatic, but those allocations can be migrated by compaction
when needed, and other patches in the series (7-9) improve that aspect.

Patches 7 and 8 continue the trend of reduced unmovable fallbacks and
also reduce the impact on movable fallbacks from patch 4.

[1] https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg114237.html

This patch (of 8):

While currently there are (mostly by accident) no holes in struct
compact_control (on x86_64), but we are going to add more bool flags, so
place them all together to the end of the structure.  While at it, just
order all fields from largest to smallest.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170307131545.28577-2-vbabka@suse.cz
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>