On 10/5/20 2:15 PM, David Hildenbrand wrote:
__putback_isolated_page() already documents that pages will be placed to the tail of the freelist - this is, however, not the case for "order >= MAX_ORDER - 2" (see buddy_merge_likely()) - which should be the case for all existing users. This change affects two users: - free page reporting - page isolation, when undoing the isolation (including memory onlining). This behavior is desireable for pages that haven't really been touched lately, so exactly the two users that don't actually read/write page content, but rather move untouched pages. The new behavior is especially desirable for memory onlining, where we allow allocation of newly onlined pages via undo_isolate_page_range() in online_pages(). Right now, we always place them to the head of the freelist, resulting in undesireable behavior: Assume we add individual memory chunks via add_memory() and online them right away to the NORMAL zone. We create a dependency chain of unmovable allocations e.g., via the memmap. The memmap of the next chunk will be placed onto previous chunks - if the last block cannot get offlined+removed, all dependent ones cannot get offlined+removed. While this can already be observed with individual DIMMs, it's more of an issue for virtio-mem (and I suspect also ppc DLPAR). Document that this should only be used for optimizations, and no code should rely on this behavior for correction (if the order of the freelists ever changes). We won't care about page shuffling: memory onlining already properly shuffles after onlining. free page reporting doesn't care about physically contiguous ranges, and there are already cases where page isolation will simply move (physically close) free pages to (currently) the head of the freelists via move_freepages_block() instead of shuffling. If this becomes ever relevant, we should shuffle the whole zone when undoing isolation of larger ranges, and after free_contig_range(). Reviewed-by: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Oscar Salvador <osalvador@xxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Wei Yang <richard.weiyang@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Pankaj Gupta <pankaj.gupta.linux@xxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>
