Compaction caches the migration and free scanner positions between
compaction invocations, so that the whole zone gets eventually scanned and
there is no bias towards the initial scanner positions at the
beginning/end of the zone.
The cached positions are continuously updated as scanners progress and the
updating stops as soon as a page is successfully isolated. The reasoning
behind this is that a pageblock where isolation succeeded is likely to
succeed again in near future and it should be worth revisiting it.
However, the downside is that potentially many pages are rescanned without
successful isolation. At worst, there might be a page where isolation
from LRU succeeds but migration fails (potentially always). So upon
encountering this page, cached position would always stop being updated
for no good reason. It might have been useful to let such page be
rescanned with sync compaction after async one failed, but this is now
handled by caching scanner position for async and sync mode separately
since commit 35979ef339 ("mm, compaction: add per-zone migration pfn
cache for async compaction").
After this patch, cached positions are updated unconditionally. In
stress-highalloc benchmark, this has decreased the numbers of scanned
pages by few percent, without affecting allocation success rates.
To prevent free scanner from leaving free pages behind after they are
returned due to page migration failure, the cached scanner pfn is changed
to point to the pageblock of the returned free page with the highest pfn,
before leaving compact_zone().
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@mina86.com>
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
6bace090a2