linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: page_alloc: avoid slowpath for more than MAX

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Message-ID: <20130723043520.GH715@cmpxchg.org>
Date:	Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:35:20 -0400
From:	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
To:	PINTU KUMAR <pintu_agarwal@...oo.com>
Cc:	Pintu Kumar <pintu.k@...sung.com>,
	"akpm@...ux-foundation.org" <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"mgorman@...e.de" <mgorman@...e.de>,
	"jiang.liu@...wei.com" <jiang.liu@...wei.com>,
	"minchan@...nel.org" <minchan@...nel.org>,
	"cody@...ux.vnet.ibm.com" <cody@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	"linux-mm@...ck.org" <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"cpgs@...sung.com" <cpgs@...sung.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm: page_alloc: avoid slowpath for more than
 MAX_ORDER allocation.

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 07:01:18PM -0700, PINTU KUMAR wrote:
> >Lastly, order >= MAX_ORDER is not supported by the page allocator, and
> >we do not want to punish 99.999% of all legitimate page allocations in
> >the fast path in order to catch an unlikely situation like this.
[...]
> >Having the check only in the slowpath is a good thing.
> >
> Sorry, I could not understand, why adding this check in slowpath is only good.
> We could have returned failure much before that.
> Without this check, we are actually allowing failure of "first allocation attempt" and then returning the cause of failure in slowpath.
> I thought it will be better to track the unlikely failure in the system as early as possible, at least from the embedded system prospective.
> Let me know your opinion.

This is a trade-off between two cases: we expect (almost) all
allocations to be order < MAX_ORDER, so we want that path as
lightweight as possible.  On the other hand, we expect that only very
rarely an allocation will specify order >= MAX_ORDER.  By doing the
check late, we make the common case faster at the expense of the rare
case.  That's the whole point of having a fast path and a slow path.

What you are proposing would punish 99.999% of all cases in order to
speed up the 0.001% cases.  In addition, these 0.001% of all cases
will fail the allocation, so performance is the least of their
worries.  It's a bad trade-off.
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