linux.git/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt, branch v5.1

mm: do not boost watermarks to avoid fragmentation for the DISCONTIG memory model

2019-04-26T16:18:05+00:00

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.

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: Mel Gorman 
Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka 
Tested-by: Mikulas Patocka 
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: James Bottomley 
Cc: Matthew Wilcox 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt: Fix drop_caches bit number

2019-01-15T00:25:04+00:00

Bits are usually numbered starting from zero, so 4 should be bit 2, not
bit 3.

Suggested-by: Matthew Wilcox 
Signed-off-by: Vincent Whitchurch 
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet

mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs

2018-12-28T20:11:48+00:00

An external fragmentation event was previously described as

    When the page allocator fragments memory, it records the event using
    the mm_page_alloc_extfrag event. If the fallback_order is smaller
    than a pageblock order (order-9 on 64-bit x86) then it's considered
    an event that will cause external fragmentation issues in the future.

The kernel reduces the probability of such events by increasing the
watermark sizes by calling set_recommended_min_free_kbytes early in the
lifetime of the system.  This works reasonably well in general but if
there are enough sparsely populated pageblocks then the problem can still
occur as enough memory is free overall and kswapd stays asleep.

This patch introduces a watermark_boost_factor sysctl that allows a zone
watermark to be temporarily boosted when an external fragmentation causing
events occurs.  The boosting will stall allocations that would decrease
free memory below the boosted low watermark and kswapd is woken if the
calling context allows to reclaim an amount of memory relative to the size
of the high watermark and the watermark_boost_factor until the boost is
cleared.  When kswapd finishes, it wakes kcompactd at the pageblock order
to clean some of the pageblocks that may have been affected by the
fragmentation event.  kswapd avoids any writeback, slab shrinkage and swap
from reclaim context during this operation to avoid excessive system
disruption in the name of fragmentation avoidance.  Care is taken so that
kswapd will do normal reclaim work if the system is really low on memory.

This was evaluated using the same workloads as "mm, page_alloc: Spread
allocations across zones before introducing fragmentation".

1-socket Skylake machine
config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale XFS (no special madvise)
4 fio threads, 1 THP allocating thread
--------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9:   804694
4.20-rc3+patch:                      408912 (49% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                    18421 (98% reduction)

                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Amean     fault-base-1      653.58 (   0.00%)      652.71 (   0.13%)
Amean     fault-huge-1        0.00 (   0.00%)      178.93 * -99.00%*

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-1        0.00 (   0.00%)        5.12 ( 100.00%)

Note that external fragmentation causing events are massively reduced by
this path whether in comparison to the previous kernel or the vanilla
kernel.  The fault latency for huge pages appears to be increased but that
is only because THP allocations were successful with the patch applied.

1-socket Skylake machine
global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-madvhugepage-xfs (MADV_HUGEPAGE)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9:  291392
4.20-rc3+patch:                     191187 (34% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                   13464 (95% reduction)

thpfioscale Fault Latencies
                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Min       fault-base-1      912.00 (   0.00%)      905.00 (   0.77%)
Min       fault-huge-1      127.00 (   0.00%)      135.00 (  -6.30%)
Amean     fault-base-1     1467.55 (   0.00%)     1481.67 (  -0.96%)
Amean     fault-huge-1     1127.11 (   0.00%)     1063.88 *   5.61%*

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-1       77.64 (   0.00%)       83.46 (   7.49%)

As before, massive reduction in external fragmentation events, some jitter
on latencies and an increase in THP allocation success rates.

2-socket Haswell machine
config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale XFS (no special madvise)
4 fio threads, 5 THP allocating threads
----------------------------------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9:  215698
4.20-rc3+patch:                     200210 (7% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                   14263 (93% reduction)

                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Amean     fault-base-5     1346.45 (   0.00%)     1306.87 (   2.94%)
Amean     fault-huge-5     3418.60 (   0.00%)     1348.94 (  60.54%)

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-5        0.78 (   0.00%)        7.91 ( 910.64%)

There is a 93% reduction in fragmentation causing events, there is a big
reduction in the huge page fault latency and allocation success rate is
higher.

2-socket Haswell machine
global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-madvhugepage-xfs (MADV_HUGEPAGE)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9: 166352
4.20-rc3+patch:                    147463 (11% reduction)
4.20-rc3+patch1-4:                  11095 (93% reduction)

thpfioscale Fault Latencies
                                   4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                                 lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Amean     fault-base-5     6217.43 (   0.00%)     7419.67 * -19.34%*
Amean     fault-huge-5     3163.33 (   0.00%)     3263.80 (  -3.18%)

                              4.20.0-rc3             4.20.0-rc3
                            lowzone-v5r8             boost-v5r8
Percentage huge-5       95.14 (   0.00%)       87.98 (  -7.53%)

There is a large reduction in fragmentation events with some jitter around
the latencies and success rates.  As before, the high THP allocation
success rate does mean the system is under a lot of pressure.  However, as
the fragmentation events are reduced, it would be expected that the
long-term allocation success rate would be higher.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181123114528.28802-5-mgorman@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Zi Yan 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt: update __vm_enough_memory()'s path

2018-08-22T17:52:44+00:00

__vm_enough_memory has moved to mm/util.c.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/E18EDF4A4FA4A04BBFA824B6D7699E532A7E5913@EXMBX-SZMAIL013.tencent.com
Signed-off-by: Juvi Liu 
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Documentation: vm.txt: Adding 'nr_hugepages_mempolicy' parameter description.

2018-07-26T22:24:16+00:00

This patch adds 'nr_hugepages_mempolicy' parameter which is currently missing
in 'vm.txt' file. It also contains a short description of 'nr_hugepages_mempolicy'
parameter.

Signed-off-by: Prashant Dhamdhere 
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet

doc: add description to dirtytime_expire_seconds

2018-06-26T15:01:35+00:00

commit 1efff914afac8a965ad63817ecf8861a927c2ace ("fs: add
dirtytime_expire_seconds sysctl") introduced dirtytime_expire_seconds
knob, but there is not description about it in
Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt.

Add the description for it.

Cc: Theodore Ts'o 
Signed-off-by: Yang Shi 
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet

docs/admin-guide/mm: start moving here files from Documentation/vm

2018-04-27T23:02:48+00:00

Several documents in Documentation/vm fit quite well into the "admin/user
guide" category. The documents that don't overload the reader with lots of
implementation details and provide coherent description of certain feature
can be moved to Documentation/admin-guide/mm.

Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport 
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet

Merge branch 'mm-rst' into docs-next

2018-04-16T20:25:08+00:00

Mike Rapoport says:

  These patches convert files in Documentation/vm to ReST format, add an
  initial index and link it to the top level documentation.

  There are no contents changes in the documentation, except few spelling
  fixes. The relatively large diffstat stems from the indentation and
  paragraph wrapping changes.

  I've tried to keep the formatting as consistent as possible, but I could
  miss some places that needed markup and add some markup where it was not
  necessary.

[jc: significant conflicts in vm/hmm.rst]

docs/vm: rename documentation files to .rst

2018-04-16T20:18:15+00:00

Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport 
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet

mm/page_alloc: don't reserve ZONE_HIGHMEM for ZONE_MOVABLE request

2018-04-11T17:28:32+00:00

Freepage on ZONE_HIGHMEM doesn't work for kernel memory so it's not that
important to reserve.  When ZONE_MOVABLE is used, this problem would
theorectically cause to decrease usable memory for GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE
allocation request which is mainly used for page cache and anon page
allocation.  So, fix it by setting 0 to
sysctl_lowmem_reserve_ratio[ZONE_HIGHMEM].

And, defining sysctl_lowmem_reserve_ratio array by MAX_NR_ZONES - 1 size
makes code complex.  For example, if there is highmem system, following
reserve ratio is activated for *NORMAL ZONE* which would be easyily
misleading people.

 #ifdef CONFIG_HIGHMEM
 32
 #endif

This patch also fixes this situation by defining
sysctl_lowmem_reserve_ratio array by MAX_NR_ZONES and place "#ifdef" to
right place.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1504672525-17915-1-git-send-email-iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com
Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Reviewed-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V 
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka 
Tested-by: Tony Lindgren 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Vlastimil Babka 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: "Aneesh Kumar K . V" 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Laura Abbott 
Cc: Marek Szyprowski 
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz 
Cc: Russell King 
Cc: Will Deacon 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds