mm, compaction: require only min watermarks for non-costly orders

The __compaction_suitable() function checks the low watermark plus a
compact_gap() gap to decide if there's enough free memory to perform
compaction.  Then __isolate_free_page uses low watermark check to decide
if particular free page can be isolated.  In the latter case, using low
watermark is needlessly pessimistic, as the free page isolations are
only temporary.  For __compaction_suitable() the higher watermark makes
sense for high-order allocations where more freepages increase the
chance of success, and we can typically fail with some order-0 fallback
when the system is struggling to reach that watermark.  But for
low-order allocation, forming the page should not be that hard.  So
using low watermark here might just prevent compaction from even trying,
and eventually lead to OOM killer even if we are above min watermarks.

So after this patch, we use min watermark for non-costly orders in
__compaction_suitable(), and for all orders in __isolate_free_page().

[vbabka@suse.cz: clarify __isolate_free_page() comment]
 Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/7ae4baec-4eca-e70b-2a69-94bea4fb19fa@suse.cz
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160810091226.6709-11-vbabka@suse.cz
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Tested-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <lstoakes@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Tested-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <lstoakes@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 637b0e907df0..c988d324e3f6 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -2489,8 +2489,13 @@ int __isolate_free_page(struct page *page, unsigned int order)
 	mt = get_pageblock_migratetype(page);
 
 	if (!is_migrate_isolate(mt)) {
-		/* Obey watermarks as if the page was being allocated */
-		watermark = low_wmark_pages(zone) + (1 << order);
+		/*
+		 * Obey watermarks as if the page was being allocated. We can
+		 * emulate a high-order watermark check with a raised order-0
+		 * watermark, because we already know our high-order page
+		 * exists.
+		 */
+		watermark = min_wmark_pages(zone) + (1UL << order);
 		if (!zone_watermark_ok(zone, 0, watermark, 0, ALLOC_CMA))
 			return 0;