-
Mel Gorman authored
The primary purpose of watermarks is to ensure that reclaim can always make forward progress in PF_MEMALLOC context (kswapd and direct reclaim). These assume that order-0 allocations are all that is necessary for forward progress. High-order watermarks serve a different purpose. Kswapd had no high-order awareness before they were introduced (https://lkml.kernel.org/r/413AA7B2.4000907@yahoo.com.au). This was particularly important when there were high-order atomic requests. The watermarks both gave kswapd awareness and made a reserve for those atomic requests. There are two important side-effects of this. The most important is that a non-atomic high-order request can fail even though free pages are available and the order-0 watermarks are ok. The second is that high-order watermark checks are expensive as the free list counts up to the requested order must be examined. With the introduction of MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC it is no longer necessary to have high-order watermarks. Kswapd and compaction still need high-order awareness which is handled by checking that at least one suitable high-order page is free. With the patch applied, there was little difference in the allocation failure rates as the atomic reserves are small relative to the number of allocation attempts. The expected impact is that there will never be an allocation failure report that shows suitable pages on the free lists. The one potential side-effect of this is that in a vanilla kernel, the watermark checks may have kept a free page for an atomic allocation. Now, we are 100% relying on the HighAtomic reserves and an early allocation to have allocated them. If the first high-order atomic allocation is after the system is already heavily fragmented then it'll fail. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: simplify __zone_watermark_ok(), per Vlastimil] Signed-off-by:
Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> Acked-by:
Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Acked-by:
Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Acked-by:
Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Vitaly Wool <vitalywool@gmail.com> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
97a16fc8