This is a very preliminary RFC. I'm posting this early as the __GFP_THISNODE discussion continues and has started looking at the compaction implementation and it'd be worth looking at this series fdirst. The cc list is based on that dicussion just to make them aware it exists. A v2 will have a significantly trimmed cc. This series reduces scan rates and success rates of compaction, primarily by using the free lists to shorten scans and better controlling of skip information and whether multiple scanners can target the same block. There still is much room for improvement but we probably should get these out of the way first as they are pre-requisites for anything smarter. Test data is still incomplete but I'm not expecting major differences on 2-socket vs 1-socket given the type of series. That might be wrong. Primarily I'm using thpscale to measure the impact of the series. The benchmark creates a large file, maps it, faults it, punches holes in the mapping so that the virtual address space is fragmented and then tries to allocate THP. It re-executes for different numbers of threads. From a fragmentation perspective, the workload is relatively benign but it does stress compaction. The overall impact on latencies for a 1-socket machine is 4.20.0-rc6 4.20.0-rc6 mmotm-20181210 capture-v1r8 Amean fault-both-3 3842.11 ( 0.00%) 2898.64 * 24.56%* Amean fault-both-5 5201.92 ( 0.00%) 4296.58 ( 17.40%) Amean fault-both-7 7086.15 ( 0.00%) 6203.55 ( 12.46%) Amean fault-both-12 11383.58 ( 0.00%) 9309.13 * 18.22%* Amean fault-both-18 16616.53 ( 0.00%) 6245.27 * 62.42%* Amean fault-both-24 18617.05 ( 0.00%) 15083.42 * 18.98%* Amean fault-both-30 24372.88 ( 0.00%) 11498.60 * 52.82%* Amean fault-both-32 22621.58 ( 0.00%) 9684.82 * 57.19%* 24-62% reduction in fault latency (be it base or huge page) The allocation success rates which are using MADV_HUGEPAGE are as follows; 4.20.0-rc6 4.20.0-rc6 mmotm-20181210 capture-v1r8 Percentage huge-3 85.74 ( 0.00%) 98.12 ( 14.44%) Percentage huge-5 89.16 ( 0.00%) 98.83 ( 10.85%) Percentage huge-7 85.98 ( 0.00%) 97.99 ( 13.97%) Percentage huge-12 84.19 ( 0.00%) 99.00 ( 17.59%) Percentage huge-18 81.20 ( 0.00%) 98.92 ( 21.83%) Percentage huge-24 82.60 ( 0.00%) 99.08 ( 19.95%) Percentage huge-30 82.87 ( 0.00%) 99.22 ( 19.74%) Percentage huge-32 81.98 ( 0.00%) 98.97 ( 20.72%) So, it's showing that the series is not far short of allocating 100% of the requested pages as huge pages. Finally the overall scan rates are as follows Compaction migrate scanned 677936161 4756927 Compaction free scanned 352045485 256525622 Kcompactd migrate scanned 751732 751080 Kcompactd free scanned 113784579 93099786 These are still pretty crazy scan rates but direct compaction migration scanning is reduced by 99% and the free scanner is reduced by 27% so it's a step in the right direction. include/linux/compaction.h | 3 +- include/linux/gfp.h | 7 +- include/linux/sched.h | 4 + kernel/sched/core.c | 3 + mm/compaction.c | 638 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------- mm/internal.h | 21 +- mm/migrate.c | 2 +- mm/page_alloc.c | 70 ++++- 8 files changed, 637 insertions(+), 111 deletions(-) -- 2.16.4