compaction has been disabled for GFP_NOFS and GFP_NOIO requests since
the direct compaction was introduced by commit 56de7263fc ("mm:
compaction: direct compact when a high-order allocation fails"). The
main reason is that the migration of page cache pages might recurse back
to fs/io layer and we could potentially deadlock. This is overly
conservative because all the anonymous memory is migrateable in the
GFP_NOFS context just fine. This might be a large portion of the memory
in many/most workkloads.
Remove the GFP_NOFS restriction and make sure that we skip all fs pages
(those with a mapping) while isolating pages to be migrated. We cannot
consider clean fs pages because they might need a metadata update so
only isolate pages without any mapping for nofs requests.
The effect of this patch will be probably very limited in many/most
workloads because higher order GFP_NOFS requests are quite rare,
although different configurations might lead to very different results.
David Chinner has mentioned a heavy metadata workload with 64kB block
which to quote him:
: Unfortunately, there was an era of cargo cult configuration tweaks in the
: Ceph community that has resulted in a large number of production machines
: with XFS filesystems configured this way. And a lot of them store large
: numbers of small files and run under significant sustained memory
: pressure.
:
: I slowly working towards getting rid of these high order allocations and
: replacing them with the equivalent number of single page allocations, but
: I haven't got that (complex) change working yet.
We can do the following to simulate that workload:
$ mkfs.xfs -f -n size=64k <dev>
$ mount <dev> /mnt/scratch
$ time ./fs_mark -D 10000 -S0 -n 100000 -s 0 -L 32 \
-d /mnt/scratch/0 -d /mnt/scratch/1 \
-d /mnt/scratch/2 -d /mnt/scratch/3 \
-d /mnt/scratch/4 -d /mnt/scratch/5 \
-d /mnt/scratch/6 -d /mnt/scratch/7 \
-d /mnt/scratch/8 -d /mnt/scratch/9 \
-d /mnt/scratch/10 -d /mnt/scratch/11 \
-d /mnt/scratch/12 -d /mnt/scratch/13 \
-d /mnt/scratch/14 -d /mnt/scratch/15
and indeed is hammers the system with many high order GFP_NOFS requests as
per a simle tracepoint during the load:
$ echo '!(gfp_flags & 0x80) && (gfp_flags &0x400000)' > $TRACE_MNT/events/kmem/mm_page_alloc/filter
I am getting
5287609 order=0
37 order=1
1594905 order=2
3048439 order=3
6699207 order=4
66645 order=5
My testing was done in a kvm guest so performance numbers should be
taken with a grain of salt but there seems to be a difference when the
patch is applied:
* Original kernel
FSUse% Count Size Files/sec App Overhead
1 1600000 0 4300.1 20745838
3 3200000 0 4239.9 23849857
5 4800000 0 4243.4 25939543
6 6400000 0 4248.4 19514050
8 8000000 0 4262.1 20796169
9 9600000 0 4257.6 21288675
11 11200000 0 4259.7 19375120
13 12800000 0 4220.7 22734141
14 14400000 0 4238.5 31936458
16 16000000 0 4231.5 23409901
18 17600000 0 4045.3 23577700
19 19200000 0 2783.4 58299526
21 20800000 0 2678.2 40616302
23 22400000 0 2693.5 83973996
and xfs complaining about memory allocation not making progress
[ 2304.372647] XFS: fs_mark(3289) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65624 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 2304.443323] XFS: fs_mark(3285) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65728 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 4796.772477] XFS: fs_mark(3424) possible memory allocation deadlock size 46936 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 4796.775329] XFS: fs_mark(3423) possible memory allocation deadlock size 51416 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
[ 4797.388808] XFS: fs_mark(3424) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65728 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
* Patched kernel
FSUse% Count Size Files/sec App Overhead
1 1600000 0 4289.1 19243934
3 3200000 0 4241.6 32828865
5 4800000 0 4248.7 32884693
6 6400000 0 4314.4 19608921
8 8000000 0 4269.9 24953292
9 9600000 0 4270.7 33235572
11 11200000 0 4346.4 40817101
13 12800000 0 4285.3 29972397
14 14400000 0 4297.2 20539765
16 16000000 0 4219.6 18596767
18 17600000 0 4273.8 49611187
19 19200000 0 4300.4 27944451
21 20800000 0 4270.6 22324585
22 22400000 0 4317.6 22650382
24 24000000 0 4065.2 22297964
So the dropdown at Count 19200000 didn't happen and there was only a
single warning about allocation not making progress
[ 3063.815003] XFS: fs_mark(3272) possible memory allocation deadlock size 65624 in kmem_alloc (mode:0x2408240)
This suggests that the patch has helped even though there is not all that
much of anonymous memory as the workload mostly generates fs metadata. I
assume the success rate would be higher with more anonymous memory which
should be the case in many workloads.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix comment]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20161012114721.31853-1-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <js1304@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
73e64c51af