Hi all, I have been trying for the past few days to identify the source of a performance regression that we are seeing with the 5.4 kernel but not with the 4.9 kernel on ARM64. Testing something newer like 5.10 is a bit challenging at the moment but will happen eventually. What we are seeing is a ~3x increase in the time needed for alloc_contig_range() to allocate 1GB in blocks of 2MB pages. The system is idle at the time and there are no other contenders for memory other than the user-space programs already started (DHCP client, shell, etc.). I have tried playing with the compact_control structure settings but have not found anything that would bring us back to the performance of 4.9. More often than not, we see test_pages_isolated() returning an non-zero error code which would explain the slow down, since we have some logic that re-tries the allocation if alloc_contig_range() returns -EBUSY. If I remove the retry logic however, we don't get -EBUSY and we get the results below: 4.9 shows this: [ 457.537634] allocating: size: 1024MB avg: 59172 (us), max: 137306 (us), min: 44859 (us), total: 591723 (us), pages: 512, per-page: 115 (us) [ 457.550222] freeing: size: 1024MB avg: 67397 (us), max: 151408 (us), min: 52630 (us), total: 673974 (us), pages: 512, per-page: 131 (us) 5.4 show this: [ 222.388758] allocating: size: 1024MB avg: 156739 (us), max: 157254 (us), min: 155915 (us), total: 1567394 (us), pages: 512, per-page: 306 (us) [ 222.401601] freeing: size: 1024MB avg: 209899 (us), max: 210085 (us), min: 209749 (us), total: 2098999 (us), pages: 512, per-page: 409 (us) This regression is not seen when MIGRATE_CMA is specified instead of MIGRATE_MOVABLE. A few characteristics that you should probably be aware of: - There is 4GB of memory populated with the memory being mapped into the CPU's address starting at space at 0x4000_0000 (1GB), PAGE_SIZE is 4KB - there is a ZONE_DMA32 that starts at 0x4000_0000 and ends at 0xE480_0000, from there on we have a ZONE_MOVABLE which is comprised of 0xE480_0000 - 0xfdc00000 and another range spanning 0x1_0000_0000 - 0x1_4000_0000 Attached is the kernel configuration. Thanks! -- Florian
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