Donate to e Foundation | Murena handsets with /e/OS | Own a part of Murena! Learn more

Skip to content
Commit 39f308d1 authored by Mel Gorman's avatar Mel Gorman Committed by Gerrit - the friendly Code Review server
Browse files

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.

Change-Id: If43d106b4ee735096e456039600a9c2bc3031d24
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: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Reported-by: default avatarMikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Tested-by: default avatarMikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Acked-by: default avatarVlastimil 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: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: 24512228b7a3f412b5a51f189df302616b021c33
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git


Signed-off-by: default avatarVinayak Menon <vinmenon@codeaurora.org>
parent b3ef0156
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
0% Loading or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Please register or to comment