On 3/8/20 2:23 PM, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Sat, 2020-03-07 at 14:38 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> On Fri, 6 Mar 2020 15:01:02 -0500 Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>
>> > --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
>> > +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
>> > @@ -2711,6 +2711,18 @@ __rmqueue(struct zone *zone, unsigned int
>> > order, int migratetype,
>> > {
>> > struct page *page;
>> >
>> > + /*
>> > + * Balance movable allocations between regular and CMA areas by
>> > + * allocating from CMA when over half of the zone's free memory
>> > + * is in the CMA area.
>> > + */
>> > + if (migratetype == MIGRATE_MOVABLE &&
>> > + zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_CMA_PAGES) >
>> > + zone_page_state(zone, NR_FREE_PAGES) / 2) {
>> > + page = __rmqueue_cma_fallback(zone, order);
>> > + if (page)
>> > + return page;
>> > + }
>> > retry:
>> > page = __rmqueue_smallest(zone, order, migratetype);
>> > if (unlikely(!page)) {
>>
>> __rmqueue() is a hot path (as much as any per-page operation can be a
>> hot path). What is the impact here?
>
> That is a good question. For MIGRATE_MOVABLE allocations,
> most allocations seem to be order 0, which go through the
> per cpu pages array, and rmqueue_pcplist, or be order 9.
>
> For order 9 allocations, other things seem likely to dominate
> the allocation anyway, while for order 0 allocations the
> pcp list should take away the sting?
I agree it should be in the noise. But please do put it behind CONFIG_CMA
#ifdef. My x86_64 desktop distro kernel doesn't have CONFIG_CMA. Even if this is
effectively no-op with __rmqueue_cma_fallback() returning NULL immediately, I
think the compiler cannot eliminate the two zone_page_state()'s which are
atomic_long_read(), even if it's just ultimately READ_ONCE() here, that's a
volatile cast which means elimination not possible AFAIK? Other architectures
might be even more involved.
Otherwise I agree this is a reasonable solution until CMA is rewritten.
> What I do not know is how much impact this change would
> have on other allocations, like order 3 or order 4 network
> buffer allocations from irq context...
>
> Are there cases in particular that we should be testing?
>
