mm, page_alloc: split smallest stolen page in fallback

The __rmqueue_fallback() function is called when there's no free page of
requested migratetype, and we need to steal from a different one.

There are various heuristics to make this event infrequent and reduce
permanent fragmentation.  The main one is to try stealing from a
pageblock that has the most free pages, and possibly steal them all at
once and convert the whole pageblock.  Precise searching for such
pageblock would be expensive, so instead the heuristics walks the free
lists from MAX_ORDER down to requested order and assumes that the block
with highest-order free page is likely to also have the most free pages
in total.

Chances are that together with the highest-order page, we steal also
pages of lower orders from the same block.  But then we still split the
highest order page.  This is wasteful and can contribute to
fragmentation instead of avoiding it.

This patch thus changes __rmqueue_fallback() to just steal the page(s)
and put them on the freelist of the requested migratetype, and only
report whether it was successful.  Then we pick (and eventually split)
the smallest page with __rmqueue_smallest().  This all happens under
zone lock, so nobody can steal it from us in the process.  This should
reduce fragmentation due to fallbacks.  At worst we are only stealing a
single highest-order page and waste some cycles by moving it between
lists and then removing it, but fallback is not exactly hot path so that
should not be a concern.  As a side benefit the patch removes some
duplicate code by reusing __rmqueue_smallest().

[vbabka@suse.cz: fix endless loop in the modified __rmqueue()]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/59d71b35-d556-4fc9-ee2e-1574259282fd@suse.cz
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170307131545.28577-4-vbabka@suse.cz
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions