"The objective of this patchset is to keep the system in a state where actions such as page reclaim or memory compaction will reduce external fragmentation in the system," Mel Gorman described his set of thirteen patches labeled "reduce external fragmentation by grouping pages by mobility v30". He explained, "it works by grouping pages of similar mobility together in PAGEBLOCK_NR_PAGES areas." He defined four mobility types as: "UNMOVABLE - Pages that cannot be trivially reclaimed or moved; MOVABLE - Pages that can be moved using the page migration mechanism; RECLAIMABLE - Pages that the kernel can often directly reclaim such as those used for inode caches; RESERVE - The areas where min_free_kbyte-related pages should be stored". Mel added:

"This grouping clearly requires additional work in the page allocator. kernbench shows effectively no performance difference varying between -0.2% and +1% on a variety of test machines. Success rates for huge page allocation are dramatically increased. For example, on a ppc64 machine, the vanilla kernel was only able to allocate 1% of memory as a hugepage and this was due to a single hugepage reserved as min_free_kbytes. With these patches applied, 40% was allocatable as superpages."