On Tue, Oct 04, 2016 at 10:12:15AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote: > From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> > > compaction has been disabled for GFP_NOFS and GFP_NOIO requests since > the direct compaction was introduced by 56de7263fcf3 ("mm: compaction: > direct compact when a high-order allocation fails"). The main reason > is that the migration of page cache pages might recurse back to fs/io > layer and we could potentially deadlock. This is overly conservative > because all the anonymous memory is migrateable in the GFP_NOFS context > just fine. This might be a large portion of the memory in many/most > workkloads. > > Remove the GFP_NOFS restriction and make sure that we skip all fs pages > (those with a mapping) while isolating pages to be migrated. We cannot > consider clean fs pages because they might need a metadata update so > only isolate pages without any mapping for nofs requests. > > The effect of this patch will be probably very limited in many/most > workloads because higher order GFP_NOFS requests are quite rare, You say they are rare only because you don't know how to trigger them easily. :/ Try this: # mkfs.xfs -f -n size=64k <dev> # mount <dev> /mnt/scratch # time ./fs_mark -D 10000 -S0 -n 100000 -s 0 -L 32 \ -d /mnt/scratch/0 -d /mnt/scratch/1 \ -d /mnt/scratch/2 -d /mnt/scratch/3 \ -d /mnt/scratch/4 -d /mnt/scratch/5 \ -d /mnt/scratch/6 -d /mnt/scratch/7 \ -d /mnt/scratch/8 -d /mnt/scratch/9 \ -d /mnt/scratch/10 -d /mnt/scratch/11 \ -d /mnt/scratch/12 -d /mnt/scratch/13 \ -d /mnt/scratch/14 -d /mnt/scratch/15 As soon as tail pushing on the journal starts (a few seconds in, most likely), you'll start to see lots of 65kB allocations being requested in GFP_NOFS context by the xfs-cil-worker context doing journal checkpoint formatting.... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>