compaction has been disabled for GFP_NOFS and GFP_NOIO requests since
the direct compaction was introduced by commit 56de7263 ("mm:
compaction: direct compact when a high-order allocation fails").  The
main reason is that the migration of page cache pages might recurse back
to fs/io layer and we could potentially deadlock.  This is overly
conservative because all the anonymous memory is migrateable in the
GFP_NOFS context just fine.  This might be a large portion of the memory
in many/most workkloads.

Remove the GFP_NOFS restriction and make sure that we skip all fs pages
(those with a mapping) while isolating pages to be migrated.  We cannot
consider clean fs pages because they might need a metadata update so
only isolate pages without any mapping for nofs requests.

The effect of this patch will be probably very limited in many/most
workloads because higher order GFP_NOFS requests are quite rare,
although different configurations might lead to very different results.
David Chinner has mentioned a heavy metadata workload with 64kB block
which to quote him:

: Unfortunately, there was an era of cargo cult configuration tweaks in the
: Ceph community that has resulted in a large number of production machines
: with XFS filesystems configured this way.  And a lot of them store large
: numbers of small files and run under significant sustained memory
: pressure.
:
: I slowly working towards getting rid of these high order allocations and
: replacing them with the equivalent number of single page allocations, but
: I haven't got that (complex) change working yet.

We can do the following to simulate that workload:
$ mkfs.xfs -f -n size=64k <dev>
$ mount <dev> /mnt/scratch
$ time ./fs_mark  -D  10000  -S0  -n  100000  -s  0  -L  32 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/0  -d  /mnt/scratch/1 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/2  -d  /mnt/scratch/3 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/4  -d  /mnt/scratch/5 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/6  -d  /mnt/scratch/7 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/8  -d  /mnt/scratch/9 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/10  -d  /mnt/scratch/11 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/12  -d  /mnt/scratch/13 \
        -d  /mnt/scratch/14  -d  /mnt/scratch/15

and indeed is hammers the system with many high order GFP_NOFS requests as
per a simle tracepoint during the load:
$ echo '!(gfp_flags & 0x80) && (gfp_flags &0x400000)' > $TRACE_MNT/events/kmem/mm_page_alloc/filter
I am getting
5287609 order=0
     37 order=1
1594905 order=2
3048439 order=3
6699207 order=4
  66645 order=5

My testing was done in a kvm guest so performance numbers should be
taken with a grain of salt but there seems to be a difference when the
patch is applied:

* Original kernel
FSUse%        Count         Size    Files/sec     App Overhead
     1      1600000            0       4300.1         20745838
     3      3200000            0       4239.9         23849857
     5      4800000            0       4243.4         25939543
     6      6400000            0       4248.4         19514050
     8      8000000            0       4262.1         20796169
     9      9600000            0       4257.6         21288675
    11     11200000            0       4259.7         19375120
    13     12800000            0       4220.7         22734141
    14     14400000            0       4238.5         31936458
    16     16000000            0       4231.5         23409901
    18     17600000            0       4045.3         23577700
    19     19200000            0       2783.4         58299526
    21     20800000            0       2678.2         40616302
    23     22400000            0       2693.5         83973996

and xfs complaining about memory allocation not making progress
[ 2304.372647] XFS: fs_mark(3289) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65624 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 2304.443323] XFS: fs_mark(3285) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65728 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 4796.772477] XFS: fs_mark(3424) possible memory allocation deadlock size 46936 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 4796.775329] XFS: fs_mark(3423) possible memory allocation deadlock size 51416 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 4797.388808] XFS: fs_mark(3424) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65728 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)

* Patched kernel
FSUse%        Count         Size    Files/sec     App Overhead
     1      1600000            0       4289.1         19243934
     3      3200000            0       4241.6         32828865
     5      4800000            0       4248.7         32884693
     6      6400000            0       4314.4         19608921
     8      8000000            0       4269.9         24953292
     9      9600000            0       4270.7         33235572
    11     11200000            0       4346.4         40817101
    13     12800000            0       4285.3         29972397
    14     14400000            0       4297.2         20539765
    16     16000000            0       4219.6         18596767
    18     17600000            0       4273.8         49611187
    19     19200000            0       4300.4         27944451
    21     20800000            0       4270.6         22324585
    22     22400000            0       4317.6         22650382
    24     24000000            0       4065.2         22297964

So the dropdown at Count 19200000 didn't happen and there was only a
single warning about allocation not making progress
[ 3063.815003] XFS: fs_mark(3272) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65624 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)

This suggests that the patch has helped even though there is not all that
much of anonymous memory as the workload mostly generates fs metadata.  I
assume the success rate would be higher with more anonymous memory which
should be the case in many workloads.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20161012114721.31853-1-mhocko@kernel.orgSigned-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <js1304@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>