On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 14:32 +0100, Mel Gorman wrote: > Embedded does not imply realtime constraints. > > > So, I don't think > > CMA and compaction are significantly different. > > > > CMA is used in cases such as a mobile phone needing to allocate a large > contiguous range of memory for video decoding. Compaction is used by > features such as THP with khugepaged potentially using it frequently on > x86-64 machines. The use cases are different and compaction is used by > THP a lot more than CMA is used by anything. > > If compaction can move mlocked pages then khugepaged can introduce unexpected > latencies on mlocked anonymous regions of memory. I'd like to see CMA used for memcg and things as well, where we only allocate the shadow page frames on-demand. This moves CMA out of the crappy hardware-only section and should result in pretty much everybody using it (except me, since I have cgroup=n). Anyway, THP isn't an issue for -rt, its impossible to select when you have PREEMPT_RT. > > >Compaction on the other hand is during the normal operation of the > > >machine. There are applications that assume that if anonymous memory > > >is mlocked() then access to it is close to zero latency. They are > > >not RT-critical processes (or they would disable THP) but depend on > > >this. Allowing compaction to migrate mlocked() pages will result in bugs > > >being reported by these people. > > > > > >I've received one bug this year about access latency to mlocked() regions but > > >it turned out to be a file-backed region and related to when the write-fault > > >is incurred. The ultimate fix was in the application but we'll get new bug > > >reports if anonymous mlocked pages do not preserve the current guarantees > > >on access latency. > > > > Can you please tell us your opinion about autonuma? > > I think it will have the same problem as THP using compaction. If > mlocked pages can move then there may be unexpected latencies accessing > mlocked anonymous regions. numa and rt don't mix anyway.. don't worry about that. > > I doubt we can keep such > > mlock guarantee. I think we need to suggest application fix. maybe to introduce > > MADV_UNMOVABLE is good start. it seems to solve autonuma issue too. > > > > That'll regress existing applications. It would be preferable to me that > it be the other way around to not move mlocked pages unless the user says > it's allowed. I'd say go for it, I've been telling everybody who would listen that mlock() only means no major faults for a very long time now. -- 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/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href