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authorMel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>2019-04-25 22:23:51 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2019-04-26 09:18:05 -0700
commit24512228b7a3f412b5a51f189df302616b021c33 (patch)
tree983d0e8ea8ebc889bf36b79e2a70ce2c74c13e1e /Documentation/sysctl
parente789803507b2e154ed452865ee981b038654e98d (diff)
mm: do not boost watermarks to avoid fragmentation for the DISCONTIG memory model
Mikulas Patocka reported that commit 1c30844d2dfe ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs") "broke" memory management on parisc. The machine is not NUMA but the DISCONTIG model creates three pgdats even though it's a UMA machine for the following ranges 0) Start 0x0000000000000000 End 0x000000003fffffff Size 1024 MB 1) Start 0x0000000100000000 End 0x00000001bfdfffff Size 3070 MB 2) Start 0x0000004040000000 End 0x00000040ffffffff Size 3072 MB Mikulas reported: With the patch 1c30844d2, the kernel will incorrectly reclaim the first zone when it fills up, ignoring the fact that there are two completely free zones. Basiscally, it limits cache size to 1GiB. For example, if I run: # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M count=2048 - with the proper kernel, there should be "Buffers - 2GiB" when this command finishes. With the patch 1c30844d2, buffers will consume just 1GiB or slightly more, because the kernel was incorrectly reclaiming them. The page allocator and reclaim makes assumptions that pgdats really represent NUMA nodes and zones represent ranges and makes decisions on that basis. Watermark boosting for small pgdats leads to unexpected results even though this would have behaved reasonably on SPARSEMEM. DISCONTIG is essentially deprecated and even parisc plans to move to SPARSEMEM so there is no need to be fancy, this patch simply disables watermark boosting by default on DISCONTIGMEM. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190419094335.GJ18914@techsingularity.net Fixes: 1c30844d2dfe ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs") Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> Tested-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/sysctl')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt16
1 files changed, 8 insertions, 8 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 6af24cdb25cc..3f13d8599337 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -866,14 +866,14 @@ The intent is that compaction has less work to do in the future and to
increase the success rate of future high-order allocations such as SLUB
allocations, THP and hugetlbfs pages.
-To make it sensible with respect to the watermark_scale_factor parameter,
-the unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of 15,000 means
-that up to 150% of the high watermark will be reclaimed in the event of
-a pageblock being mixed due to fragmentation. The level of reclaim is
-determined by the number of fragmentation events that occurred in the
-recent past. If this value is smaller than a pageblock then a pageblocks
-worth of pages will be reclaimed (e.g. 2MB on 64-bit x86). A boost factor
-of 0 will disable the feature.
+To make it sensible with respect to the watermark_scale_factor
+parameter, the unit is in fractions of 10,000. The default value of
+15,000 on !DISCONTIGMEM configurations means that up to 150% of the high
+watermark will be reclaimed in the event of a pageblock being mixed due
+to fragmentation. The level of reclaim is determined by the number of
+fragmentation events that occurred in the recent past. If this value is
+smaller than a pageblock then a pageblocks worth of pages will be reclaimed
+(e.g. 2MB on 64-bit x86). A boost factor of 0 will disable the feature.
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