Currently, pages which are marked as unevictable are protected from
compaction, but not from other types of migration. The POSIX real time
extension explicitly states that mlock() will prevent a major page
fault, but the spirit of is is that mlock() should give a process the
ability to control sources of latency, including minor page faults.
However, the mlock manpage only explicitly says that a locked page will
not be written to swap and this can cause some confusion. The
compaction code today, does not give a developer who wants to avoid swap
but wants to have large contiguous areas available any method to achieve
this state. This patch introduces a sysctl for controlling compaction
behavoir with respect to the unevictable lru. Users that demand no page
faults after a page is present can set compact_unevictable to 0 and
users who need the large contiguous areas can enable compaction on
locked memory by setting it to 1.
To illustrate this problem I wrote a quick test program that mmaps a
large number of 1MB files filled with random data. These maps are
created locked and read only. Then every other mmap is unmapped and I
attempt to allocate huge pages to the static huge page pool. When the
compact_unevictable sysctl is 0, I cannot allocate hugepages after
fragmenting memory. When the value is set to 1, allocations succeed.
Signed-off-by: Eric B Munson <emunson@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxx>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxx>
Cc: linux-mm@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
---
Changes from V3:
* Updated changelog
* Restrict valid input to 0 or 1 in sysctl
* Add documentation to sysctl/vm.txt
Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt | 11 +++++++++++
include/linux/compaction.h | 1 +
kernel/sysctl.c | 9 +++++++++
mm/compaction.c | 3 +++
4 files changed, 24 insertions(+)
diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 902b457..812f0d4 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
- admin_reserve_kbytes
- block_dump
- compact_memory
+- compact_unevictable
- dirty_background_bytes
- dirty_background_ratio
- dirty_bytes
@@ -106,6 +107,16 @@ huge pages although processes will also directly compact memory as required.
==============================================================
+compact_unevictable
+
+Available only when CONFIG_COMPACTION is set. When set to 1, compaction is
+allowed to examine the unevictable lru (mlocked pages) for pages to compact.
+This should be used on systems where stalls for minor page faults are an
+acceptable trade for large contiguous free memory. Set to 0 to prevent
+compaction from moving pages that are unevictable.
+
+==============================================================
+
dirty_background_bytes
Contains the amount of dirty memory at which the background kernel
diff --git a/include/linux/compaction.h b/include/linux/compaction.h
index a014559..9dd7e7c 100644
--- a/include/linux/compaction.h
+++ b/include/linux/compaction.h
@@ -34,6 +34,7 @@ extern int sysctl_compaction_handler(struct ctl_table *table, int write,
extern int sysctl_extfrag_threshold;
extern int sysctl_extfrag_handler(struct ctl_table *table, int write,
void __user *buffer, size_t *length, loff_t *ppos);
+extern int sysctl_compact_unevictable;
extern int fragmentation_index(struct zone *zone, unsigned int order);
extern unsigned long try_to_compact_pages(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
diff --git a/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c
index 88ea2d6..9272568 100644
--- a/kernel/sysctl.c
+++ b/kernel/sysctl.c
@@ -1313,6 +1313,15 @@ static struct ctl_table vm_table[] = {
.extra1 = &min_extfrag_threshold,
.extra2 = &max_extfrag_threshold,
},
+ {
+ .procname = "compact_unevictable",
+ .data = &sysctl_compact_unevictable,
+ .maxlen = sizeof(int),
+ .mode = 0644,
+ .proc_handler = proc_dointvec,
+ .extra1 = &zero,
+ .extra2 = &one,
+ },
#endif /* CONFIG_COMPACTION */
{
diff --git a/mm/compaction.c b/mm/compaction.c
index 8c0d945..342b221 100644
--- a/mm/compaction.c
+++ b/mm/compaction.c
@@ -1046,6 +1046,8 @@ typedef enum {
ISOLATE_SUCCESS, /* Pages isolated, migrate */
} isolate_migrate_t;
+int sysctl_compact_unevictable;
+
/*
* Isolate all pages that can be migrated from the first suitable block,
* starting at the block pointed to by the migrate scanner pfn within
@@ -1057,6 +1059,7 @@ static isolate_migrate_t isolate_migratepages(struct zone *zone,
unsigned long low_pfn, end_pfn;
struct page *page;
const isolate_mode_t isolate_mode =
+ (sysctl_compact_unevictable ? ISOLATE_UNEVICTABLE : 0) |
(cc->mode == MIGRATE_ASYNC ? ISOLATE_ASYNC_MIGRATE : 0);
/*
--
1.7.9.5
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