Hi, I have posted this work as an RFC [1] and there were no fundamental objections to the approach so I am resending for inclusion. It is quite late in the release cycle and I definitely do not want to rush this into the next release cycle but having it in linux-next for longer should be only better to show potential fallouts. Motivation: THP migration is hacked into the generic migration with rather surprising semantic. The migration allocation callback is supposed to check whether the THP can be migrated at once and if that is not the case then it allocates a simple page to migrate. unmap_and_move then fixes that up by splitting the THP into small pages while moving the head page to the newly allocated order-0 page. Remaining pages are moved to the LRU list by split_huge_page. The same happens if the THP allocation fails. This is really ugly and error prone [2]. I also believe that split_huge_page to the LRU lists is inherently wrong because all tail pages are not migrated. Some callers will just work around that by retrying (e.g. memory hotplug). There are other pfn walkers which are simply broken though. e.g. madvise_inject_error will migrate head and then advances next pfn by the huge page size. do_move_page_to_node_array, queue_pages_range (migrate_pages, mbind), will simply split the THP before migration if the THP migration is not supported then falls back to single page migration but it doesn't handle tail pages if the THP migration path is not able to allocate a fresh THP so we end up with ENOMEM and fail the whole migration which is a questionable behavior. Page compaction doesn't try to migrate large pages so it should be immune. The first patch reworks do_pages_move which relies on a very ugly calling semantic when the return status is pushed to the migration path via private pointer. It uses pre allocated fixed size batching to achieve that. We simply cannot do the same if a THP is to be split during the migration path which is done in the patch 3. Patch 2 is follow up cleanup which removes the mentioned return status calling convention ugliness. On a side note: There are some semantic issues I have encountered on the way when working on patch 1 but I am not addressing them here. E.g. trying to move THP tail pages will result in either success or EBUSY (the later one more likely once we isolate head from the LRU list). Hugetlb reports EACCESS on tail pages. Some errors are reported via status parameter but migration failures are not even though the original `reason' argument suggests there was an intention to do so. From a quick look into git history this never worked. I have tried to keep the semantic unchanged. Then there is a relatively minor thing that the page isolation might fail because of pages not being on the LRU - e.g. because they are sitting on the per-cpu LRU caches. Easily fixable. Shortlog Michal Hocko (3): mm, numa: rework do_pages_move mm, migrate: remove reason argument from new_page_t mm: unclutter THP migration Diffstat include/linux/migrate.h | 7 +- include/linux/page-isolation.h | 3 +- mm/compaction.c | 3 +- mm/huge_memory.c | 6 + mm/internal.h | 1 + mm/memory_hotplug.c | 5 +- mm/mempolicy.c | 40 +---- mm/migrate.c | 354 ++++++++++++++++++----------------------- mm/page_isolation.c | 3 +- 9 files changed, 181 insertions(+), 241 deletions(-) [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20171208161559.27313-1-mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx [2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20171121021855.50525-1-zi.yan@xxxxxxxx -- 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>