Synchronous memory compaction can be very expensive: it can iterate an enormous amount of memory without aborting, constantly rescheduling, waiting on page locks and lru_lock, etc, if a pageblock cannot be defragmented. Unfortunately, it's too expensive for pagefault for transparent hugepages and it's much better to simply fallback to pages. On 128GB machines, we find that synchronous memory compaction can take O(seconds) for a single thp fault. Now that async compaction remembers where it left off without strictly relying on sync compaction, this makes thp allocations best-effort without causing egregious latency during pagefault. Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/page_alloc.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -2656,7 +2656,7 @@ rebalance: /* Wait for some write requests to complete then retry */ wait_iff_congested(preferred_zone, BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/50); goto rebalance; - } else { + } else if (!(gfp_mask & __GFP_NO_KSWAPD)) { /* * High-order allocations do not necessarily loop after * direct reclaim and reclaim/compaction depends on compaction -- 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/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>