linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 21/22] mm, compaction: Be selective about what pageblocks to clear skip hints

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Message-ID: <9318efb7-cf20-b87d-9038-27406925b161@suse.cz>
Date:   Thu, 31 Jan 2019 16:45:16 +0100
From:   Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>
To:     Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>,
        Linux List Kernel Mailing <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 21/22] mm, compaction: Be selective about what pageblocks
 to clear skip hints

On 1/18/19 6:51 PM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> Pageblock hints are cleared when compaction restarts or kswapd makes enough
> progress that it can sleep but it's over-eager in that the bit is cleared
> for migration sources with no LRU pages and migration targets with no free
> pages. As pageblock skip hint flushes are relatively rare and out-of-band
> with respect to kswapd, this patch makes a few more expensive checks to
> see if it's appropriate to even clear the bit. Every pageblock that is
> not cleared will avoid 512 pages being scanned unnecessarily on x86-64.
> 
> The impact is variable with different workloads showing small differences
> in latency, success rates and scan rates. This is expected as clearing
> the hints is not that common but doing a small amount of work out-of-band
> to avoid a large amount of work in-band later is generally a good thing.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@...hsingularity.net>

Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>