Currently, pages which are marked as unevictable are protected from
compaction, but not from other types of migration. The POSIX real time
extension explicitly states that mlock() will prevent a major page
fault, but the spirit of this is that mlock() should give a process the
ability to control sources of latency, including minor page faults.
However, the mlock manpage only explicitly says that a locked page will
not be written to swap and this can cause some confusion. The
compaction code today does not give a developer who wants to avoid swap
but wants to have large contiguous areas available any method to achieve
this state. This patch introduces a sysctl for controlling compaction
behavior with respect to the unevictable lru. Users who demand no page
faults after a page is present can set compact_unevictable_allowed to 0
and users who need the large contiguous areas can enable compaction on
locked memory by leaving the default value of 1.
To illustrate this problem I wrote a quick test program that mmaps a
large number of 1MB files filled with random data. These maps are
created locked and read only. Then every other mmap is unmapped and I
attempt to allocate huge pages to the static huge page pool. When the
compact_unevictable_allowed sysctl is 0, I cannot allocate hugepages
after fragmenting memory. When the value is set to 1, allocations
succeed.
Signed-off-by: Eric B Munson <emunson@akamai.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
5bbe3547aa
