mm: page_alloc: exclude unreclaimable allocations from zone fairness policy

hnaz · torvalds · commit 73f038b863df · 2013-12-18T19:04:51.000-08:00
Dave Hansen noted a regression in a microbenchmark that loops around open() and close() on an 8-node NUMA machine and bisected it down to commit 81c0a2b ("mm: page_alloc: fair zone allocator policy"). That change forces the slab allocations of the file descriptor to spread out to all 8 nodes, causing remote references in the page allocator and slab. The round-robin policy is only there to provide fairness among memory allocations that are reclaimed involuntarily based on pressure in each zone. It does not make sense to apply it to unreclaimable kernel allocations that are freed manually, in this case instantly after the allocation, and incur the remote reference costs twice for no reason. Only round-robin allocations that are usually freed through page reclaim or slab shrinking. Bisected by Dave Hansen. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -1920,7 +1920,8 @@ get_page_from_freelist(gfp_t gfp_mask, nodemask_t *nodemask, unsigned int order,
 		 * back to remote zones that do not partake in the
 		 * fairness round-robin cycle of this zonelist.
 		 */
-		if (alloc_flags & ALLOC_WMARK_LOW) {
+		if ((alloc_flags & ALLOC_WMARK_LOW) &&
+		    (gfp_mask & GFP_MOVABLE_MASK)) {
 			if (zone_page_state(zone, NR_ALLOC_BATCH) <= 0)
 				continue;
 			if (zone_reclaim_mode &&
