Allocation of hugetlb pages via sysctl or procfs can stall for minutes or hours. A simple example on a two node system with 8GB of memory is as follows: echo 4096 > /sys/devices/system/node/node1/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages echo 4096 > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages Obviously, both allocation attempts will fall short of their 8GB goal. However, one or both of these commands may stall and not be interruptible. The issues were initially discussed in mail thread [1] and RFC code at [2]. This series addresses the issues causing the stalls. There are two distinct fixes, and an optimization. The reclaim patch by Hillf and compaction patch by Vlasitmil address corner cases in their respective areas. hugetlb page allocation could stall due to either of these issues. The hugetlb patch by Mike is an optimization suggested during the debug and development process. [1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/d38a095e-dc39-7e82-bb76-2c9247929f07@xxxxxxxxxx [2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190724175014.9935-1-mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx Hillf Danton (1): mm, reclaim: make should_continue_reclaim perform dryrun detection Mike Kravetz (1): hugetlbfs: don't retry when pool page allocations start to fail Vlastimil Babka (1): mm, compaction: raise compaction priority after it withdrawns include/linux/compaction.h | 22 +++++++--- mm/hugetlb.c | 86 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----- mm/page_alloc.c | 16 +++++-- mm/vmscan.c | 28 +++++++------ 4 files changed, 120 insertions(+), 32 deletions(-) -- 2.20.1