On Wed 11-07-18 18:52:45, Wei Wang wrote: > On 07/11/2018 05:21 PM, Michal Hocko wrote: > > On Tue 10-07-18 18:44:34, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > [...] > > > That was what I tried to encourage with actually removing the pages > > > form the page list. That would be an _incremental_ interface. You can > > > remove MAX_ORDER-1 pages one by one (or a hundred at a time), and mark > > > them free for ballooning that way. And if you still feel you have tons > > > of free memory, just continue removing more pages from the free list. > > We already have an interface for that. alloc_pages(GFP_NOWAIT, MAX_ORDER -1). > > So why do we need any array based interface? > > Yes, I'm trying to get free pages directly via alloc_pages, so there will be > no new mm APIs. OK. The above was just a rough example. In fact you would need a more complex gfp mask. I assume you only want to balloon only memory directly usable by the kernel so it will be (GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOWARN) & ~__GFP_RECLAIM > I plan to let free page allocation stop when the remaining system free > memory becomes close to min_free_kbytes (prevent swapping). ~__GFP_RECLAIM will make sure you are allocate as long as there is any memory without reclaim. It will not even poke the kswapd to do the background work. So I do not think you would need much more than that. But let me note that I am not really convinced how this (or previous) approach will really work in most workloads. We tend to cache heavily so there is rarely any memory free. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs
