> For sometime we have been looking at mechanisms for improving the availability
> of larger allocations under load. One of the options we have explored is
> the capturing of pages freed under direct reclaim in order to increase the
> chances of free pages coelescing before they are subject to reallocation
> by racing allocators.
>
> Following this email is a patch stack implementing page capture during
> direct reclaim. It consits of four patches. The first two simply pull
> out existing code into helpers for reuse. The third makes buddy's use
> of struct page explicit. The fourth contains the meat of the changes,
> and its leader contains a much fuller description of the feature.
>
> This update represents a rebase to -mm and incorporates feedback from
> KOSAKI Motohiro. It also incorporates an accounting fix which was
> preventing some captures.
>
> I have done a lot of comparitive testing with and without this patch
> set and in broad brush I am seeing improvements in hugepage allocations
> (worst case size) success on all of my test systems. These tests consist
> of placing a constant stream of high order allocations on the system,
> at varying rates. The results for these various runs are then averaged
> to give an overall improvement.
>
> Absolute Effective
> x86-64 2.48% 4.58%
> powerpc 5.55% 25.22%
>
> x86-64 has a relatively small huge page size and so is always much more
> effective at allocating huge pages. Even there we get a measurable
> improvement. On powerpc the huge pages are much larger and much harder
> to recover. Here we see a full 25% increase in page recovery.
>
> It should be noted that these are worst case testing, and very agressive
> taking every possible page in the system. It would be helpful to get
> wider testing in -mm.
>
> Against: 2.6.27-rc1-mm1
>
> Andrew, please consider for -mm.
>
> -apw
>
> Changes since V3:
> - Incorporates an anon vma fix pointed out by MinChan Kim
> - switch to using a pagevec for page capture collection
>
> Changes since V2:
> - Incorporates review feedback from Christoph Lameter,
> - Incorporates review feedback from Peter Zijlstra, and
> - Checkpatch fixes.
>
> Changes since V1:
> - Incorporates review feedback from KOSAKI Motohiro,
> - fixes up accounting when checking watermarks for captured pages,
> - rebase 2.6.27-rc1-mm1,
> - Incorporates review feedback from Mel.
>
>
> Andy Whitcroft (4):
> pull out the page pre-release and sanity check logic for reuse
> pull out zone cpuset and watermark checks for reuse
> buddy: explicitly identify buddy field use in struct page
> capture pages freed during direct reclaim for allocation by the
> reclaimer
>
> include/linux/mm_types.h | 4 +
> include/linux/page-flags.h | 4 +
> include/linux/pagevec.h | 1 +
> mm/internal.h | 7 +-
> mm/page_alloc.c | 265 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
> mm/vmscan.c | 118 ++++++++++++++++----
> 6 files changed, 343 insertions(+), 56 deletions(-)
>
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