Lumpy Reclaim V4

When we are out of memory of a suitable size we enter reclaim.  The current
reclaim algorithm targets pages in LRU order, which is great for fairness at
order-0 but highly unsuitable if you desire pages at higher orders.  To get
pages of higher order we must shoot down a very high proportion of memory;
>95% in a lot of cases.

This patch set adds a lumpy reclaim algorithm to the allocator.  It targets
groups of pages at the specified order anchored at the end of the active and
inactive lists.  This encourages groups of pages at the requested orders to
move from active to inactive, and active to free lists.  This behaviour is
only triggered out of direct reclaim when higher order pages have been
requested.

This patch set is particularly effective when utilised with an
anti-fragmentation scheme which groups pages of similar reclaimability
together.

This patch set is based on Peter Zijlstra's lumpy reclaim V2 patch which forms
the foundation.  Credit to Mel Gorman for sanitity checking.

Mel said:

  The patches have an application with hugepage pool resizing.

  When lumpy-reclaim is used used with ZONE_MOVABLE, the hugepages pool can
  be resized with greater reliability.  Testing on a desktop machine with 2GB
  of RAM showed that growing the hugepage pool with ZONE_MOVABLE on it's own
  was very slow as the success rate was quite low.  Without lumpy-reclaim,
  each attempt to grow the pool by 100 pages would yield 1 or 2 hugepages.
  With lumpy-reclaim, getting 40 to 70 hugepages on each attempt was typical.

[akpm@osdl.org: ia64 pfn_to_nid fixes and loop cleanup]
[bunk@stusta.de: static declarations for internal functions]
[a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl: initial lumpy V2 implementation]
Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Bob Picco <bob.picco@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mmzone.h b/include/linux/mmzone.h
index d71ff763c9df..da8eb8ad9e9b 100644
--- a/include/linux/mmzone.h
+++ b/include/linux/mmzone.h
@@ -24,6 +24,14 @@
 #endif
 #define MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES (1 << (MAX_ORDER - 1))
 
+/*
+ * PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER is the order at which allocations are deemed
+ * costly to service.  That is between allocation orders which should
+ * coelesce naturally under reasonable reclaim pressure and those which
+ * will not.
+ */
+#define PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER 3
+
 struct free_area {
 	struct list_head	free_list;
 	unsigned long		nr_free;