Greg reported that he found isolated free pages were returned back to the
VM rather than the compaction freelist. This will cause holes behind the
free scanner and cause it to reallocate additional memory if necessary
later.
He detected the problem at runtime seeing that ext4 metadata pages (esp
the ones read by "sbi->s_group_desc[i] = sb_bread(sb, block)") were
constantly visited by compaction calls of migrate_pages(). These pages
had a non-zero b_count which caused fallback_migrate_page() ->
try_to_release_page() -> try_to_free_buffers() to fail.
Memory compaction works by having a "freeing scanner" scan from one end of
a zone which isolates pages as migration targets while another "migrating
scanner" scans from the other end of the same zone which isolates pages
for migration.
When page migration fails for an isolated page, the target page is
returned to the system rather than the freelist built by the freeing
scanner. This may require the freeing scanner to continue scanning memory
after suitable migration targets have already been returned to the system
needlessly.
This patch returns destination pages to the freeing scanner freelist when
page migration fails. This prevents unnecessary work done by the freeing
scanner but also encourages memory to be as compacted as possible at the
end of the zone.
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Reported-by: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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