Commits
Mel Gorman committed 24512228b7a
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.
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 <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Reported-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil 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: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>