mm, page_alloc: reserve pageblocks for high-order atomic allocations on demand

High-order watermark checking exists for two reasons -- kswapd high-order
awareness and protection for high-order atomic requests.  Historically the
kernel depended on MIGRATE_RESERVE to preserve min_free_kbytes as
high-order free pages for as long as possible.  This patch introduces
MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC that reserves pageblocks for high-order atomic
allocations on demand and avoids using those blocks for order-0
allocations.  This is more flexible and reliable than MIGRATE_RESERVE was.

A MIGRATE_HIGHORDER pageblock is created when an atomic high-order
allocation request steals a pageblock but limits the total number to 1% of
the zone.  Callers that speculatively abuse atomic allocations for
long-lived high-order allocations to access the reserve will quickly fail.
 Note that SLUB is currently not such an abuser as it reclaims at least
once.  It is possible that the pageblock stolen has few suitable
high-order pages and will need to steal again in the near future but there
would need to be strong justification to search all pageblocks for an
ideal candidate.

The pageblocks are unreserved if an allocation fails after a direct
reclaim attempt.

The watermark checks account for the reserved pageblocks when the
allocation request is not a high-order atomic allocation.

The reserved pageblocks can not be used for order-0 allocations.  This may
allow temporary wastage until a failed reclaim reassigns the pageblock.
This is deliberate as the intent of the reservation is to satisfy a
limited number of atomic high-order short-lived requests if the system
requires them.

The stutter benchmark was used to evaluate this but while it was running
there was a systemtap script that randomly allocated between 1 high-order
page and 12.5% of memory's worth of order-3 pages using GFP_ATOMIC.  This
is much larger than the potential reserve and it does not attempt to be
realistic.  It is intended to stress random high-order allocations from an
unknown source, show that there is a reduction in failures without
introducing an anomaly where atomic allocations are more reliable than
regular allocations.  The amount of memory reserved varied throughout the
workload as reserves were created and reclaimed under memory pressure.
The allocation failures once the workload warmed up were as follows;

4.2-rc5-vanilla		70%
4.2-rc5-atomic-reserve	56%

The failure rate was also measured while building multiple kernels.  The
failure rate was 14% but is 6% with this patch applied.

Overall, this is a small reduction but the reserves are small relative to
the number of allocation requests.  In early versions of the patch, the
failure rate reduced by a much larger amount but that required much larger
reserves and perversely made atomic allocations seem more reliable than
regular allocations.

[yalin.wang2010@gmail.com: fix redundant check and a memory leak]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Vitaly Wool <vitalywool@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: yalin wang <yalin.wang2010@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/vmstat.c b/mm/vmstat.c
index 5b289dc..879a2be 100644
--- a/mm/vmstat.c
+++ b/mm/vmstat.c
@@ -923,6 +923,7 @@ static char * const migratetype_names[MIGRATE_TYPES] = {
 	"Unmovable",
 	"Reclaimable",
 	"Movable",
+	"HighAtomic",
 #ifdef CONFIG_CMA
 	"CMA",
 #endif