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 <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <[email protected]>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Cc: David Rientjes <[email protected]>
Cc: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Eric B Munson
5bbe3547aa