The retry loop in __alloc_pages_slowpath is supposed to keep trying
reclaim and compaction (and OOM), until either the allocation succeeds,
or returns with failure. Success here is more probable when reclaim
precedes compaction, as certain watermarks have to be met for compaction
to even try, and more free pages increase the probability of compaction
success. On the other hand, starting with light async compaction (if
the watermarks allow it), can be more efficient, especially for smaller
orders, if there's enough free memory which is just fragmented.
Thus, the current code starts with compaction before reclaim, and to
make sure that the last reclaim is always followed by a final
compaction, there's another direct compaction call at the end of the
loop. This makes the code hard to follow and adds some duplicated
handling of migration_mode decisions. It's also somewhat inefficient
that even if reclaim or compaction decides not to retry, the final
compaction is still attempted. Some gfp flags combination also shortcut
these retry decisions by "goto noretry;", making it even harder to
follow.
This patch attempts to restructure the code with only minimal functional
changes. The call to the first compaction and THP-specific checks are
now placed above the retry loop, and the "noretry" direct compaction is
removed.
The initial compaction is additionally restricted only to costly orders,
as we can expect smaller orders to be held back by watermarks, and only
larger orders to suffer primarily from fragmentation. This better
matches the checks in reclaim's shrink_zones().
There are two other smaller functional changes. One is that the upgrade
from async migration to light sync migration will always occur after the
initial compaction. This is how it has been until recent patch "mm,
oom: protect !costly allocations some more", which introduced upgrading
the mode based on COMPACT_COMPLETE result, but kept the final compaction
always upgraded, which made it even more special. It's better to return
to the simpler handling for now, as migration modes will be further
modified later in the series.
The second change is that once both reclaim and compaction declare it's
not worth to retry the reclaim/compact loop, there is no final
compaction attempt. As argued above, this is intentional. If that
final compaction were to succeed, it would be due to a wrong retry
decision, or simply a race with somebody else freeing memory for us.
The main outcome of this patch should be simpler code. Logically, the
initial compaction without reclaim is the exceptional case to the
reclaim/compaction scheme, but prior to the patch, it was the last loop
iteration that was exceptional. Now the code matches the logic better.
The change also enable the following patches.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160721073614.24395-5-vbabka@suse.cz
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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