mm, compaction: avoid isolating pinned pages
authorDavid Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Thu, 3 Apr 2014 21:48:00 +0000 (14:48 -0700)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Thu, 9 Oct 2014 19:21:28 +0000 (12:21 -0700)
commit1190e5c69c4329c8b8d220e8c149906af1e787c8
tree7e4810a943d2c50642abafea3c77844ecfdb0b72
parentd540b168908615f1382b7eb3dfa12f95fc79bba0
mm, compaction: avoid isolating pinned pages

commit 119d6d59dcc0980dcd581fdadb6b2033b512a473 upstream.

Page migration will fail for memory that is pinned in memory with, for
example, get_user_pages().  In this case, it is unnecessary to take
zone->lru_lock or isolating the page and passing it to page migration
which will ultimately fail.

This is a racy check, the page can still change from under us, but in
that case we'll just fail later when attempting to move the page.

This avoids very expensive memory compaction when faulting transparent
hugepages after pinning a lot of memory with a Mellanox driver.

On a 128GB machine and pinning ~120GB of memory, before this patch we
see the enormous disparity in the number of page migration failures
because of the pinning (from /proc/vmstat):

compact_pages_moved 8450
compact_pagemigrate_failed 15614415

0.05% of pages isolated are successfully migrated and explicitly
triggering memory compaction takes 102 seconds.  After the patch:

compact_pages_moved 9197
compact_pagemigrate_failed 7

99.9% of pages isolated are now successfully migrated in this
configuration and memory compaction takes less than one second.

Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
mm/compaction.c