linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v35 1/5] mm: support to get hints of free page blocks

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Date:   Wed, 11 Jul 2018 13:09:49 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     Wei Wang <wei.w.wang@...el.com>
Cc:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        virtio-dev@...ts.oasis-open.org,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        virtualization <virtualization@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
        KVM list <kvm@...r.kernel.org>, linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@...hat.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
        liliang.opensource@...il.com, yang.zhang.wz@...il.com,
        quan.xu0@...il.com, nilal@...hat.com,
        Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>, peterx@...hat.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v35 1/5] mm: support to get hints of free page blocks

On Wed 11-07-18 18:52:45, Wei Wang wrote:
> On 07/11/2018 05:21 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Tue 10-07-18 18:44:34, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > [...]
> > > That was what I tried to encourage with actually removing the pages
> > > form the page list. That would be an _incremental_ interface. You can
> > > remove MAX_ORDER-1 pages one by one (or a hundred at a time), and mark
> > > them free for ballooning that way. And if you still feel you have tons
> > > of free memory, just continue removing more pages from the free list.
> > We already have an interface for that. alloc_pages(GFP_NOWAIT, MAX_ORDER -1).
> > So why do we need any array based interface?
> 
> Yes, I'm trying to get free pages directly via alloc_pages, so there will be
> no new mm APIs.

OK. The above was just a rough example. In fact you would need a more
complex gfp mask. I assume you only want to balloon only memory directly
usable by the kernel so it will be
	(GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOWARN) & ~__GFP_RECLAIM

> I plan to let free page allocation stop when the remaining system free
> memory becomes close to min_free_kbytes (prevent swapping).

~__GFP_RECLAIM will make sure you are allocate as long as there is any
memory without reclaim. It will not even poke the kswapd to do the
background work. So I do not think you would need much more than that.

But let me note that I am not really convinced how this (or previous)
approach will really work in most workloads. We tend to cache heavily so
there is rarely any memory free.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs