mm: compaction: acquire the zone->lru_lock as late as possible

Richard Davies and Shaohua Li have both reported lock contention problems
in compaction on the zone and LRU locks as well as significant amounts of
time being spent in compaction.  This series aims to reduce lock
contention and scanning rates to reduce that CPU usage.  Richard reported
at https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/21/91 that this series made a big
different to a problem he reported in August:

   http://marc.info/?l=kvm&m=134511507015614&w=2

Patch 1 defers acquiring the zone->lru_lock as long as possible.

Patch 2 defers acquiring the zone->lock as lock as possible.

Patch 3 reverts Rik's "skip-free" patches as the core concept gets
	reimplemented later and the remaining patches are easier to
	understand if this is reverted first.

Patch 4 adds a pageblock-skip bit to the pageblock flags to cache what
	pageblocks should be skipped by the migrate and free scanners.
	This drastically reduces the amount of scanning compaction has
	to do.

Patch 5 reimplements something similar to Rik's idea except it uses the
	pageblock-skip information to decide where the scanners should
	restart from and does not need to wrap around.

I tested this on 3.6-rc6 + linux-next/akpm. Kernels tested were

akpm-20120920	3.6-rc6 + linux-next/akpm as of Septeber 20th, 2012
lesslock	Patches 1-6
revert		Patches 1-7
cachefail	Patches 1-8
skipuseless	Patches 1-9

Stress high-order allocation tests looked ok.  Success rates are more or
less the same with the full series applied but there is an expectation
that there is less opportunity to race with other allocation requests if
there is less scanning.  The time to complete the tests did not vary that
much and are uninteresting as were the vmstat statistics so I will not
present them here.

Using ftrace I recorded how much scanning was done by compaction and got this

                            3.6.0-rc6     3.6.0-rc6   3.6.0-rc6  3.6.0-rc6 3.6.0-rc6
                            akpm-20120920 lockless  revert-v2r2  cachefail skipuseless

Total   free    scanned         360753976  515414028  565479007   17103281   18916589
Total   free    isolated          2852429    3597369    4048601     670493     727840
Total   free    efficiency        0.0079%    0.0070%    0.0072%    0.0392%    0.0385%
Total   migrate scanned         247728664  822729112 1004645830   17946827   14118903
Total   migrate isolated          2555324    3245937    3437501     616359     658616
Total   migrate efficiency        0.0103%    0.0039%    0.0034%    0.0343%    0.0466%

The efficiency is worthless because of the nature of the test and the
number of failures.  The really interesting point as far as this patch
series is concerned is the number of pages scanned.  Note that reverting
Rik's patches massively increases the number of pages scanned indicating
that those patches really did make a difference to CPU usage.

However, caching what pageblocks should be skipped has a much higher
impact.  With patches 1-8 applied, free page and migrate page scanning are
both reduced by 95% in comparison to the akpm kernel.  If the basic
concept of Rik's patches are implemened on top then scanning then the free
scanner barely changed but migrate scanning was further reduced.  That
said, tests on 3.6-rc5 indicated that the last patch had greater impact
than what was measured here so it is a bit variable.

One way or the other, this series has a large impact on the amount of
scanning compaction does when there is a storm of THP allocations.

This patch:

Compaction's migrate scanner acquires the zone->lru_lock when scanning a
range of pages looking for LRU pages to acquire.  It does this even if
there are no LRU pages in the range.  If multiple processes are compacting
then this can cause severe locking contention.  To make matters worse
commit b2eef8c0 ("mm: compaction: minimise the time IRQs are disabled
while isolating pages for migration") releases the lru_lock every
SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages that are scanned.

This patch makes two changes to how the migrate scanner acquires the LRU
lock.  First, it only releases the LRU lock every SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX pages
if the lock is contended.  This reduces the number of times it
unnecessarily disables and re-enables IRQs.  The second is that it defers
acquiring the LRU lock for as long as possible.  If there are no LRU pages
or the only LRU pages are transhuge then the LRU lock will not be acquired
at all which reduces contention on zone->lru_lock.

Change-Id: If518f3acb4db4ba579b708889de0fa9f42366899
[minchan@kernel.org: augment comment]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak comment text]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Richard Davies <richard@arachsys.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: 2a1402aa044b55c2d30ab0ed9405693ef06fb07c
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>
mm: compaction: acquire the zone->lock as late as possible

Compaction's free scanner acquires the zone->lock when checking for
PageBuddy pages and isolating them.  It does this even if there are no
PageBuddy pages in the range.

This patch defers acquiring the zone lock for as long as possible.  In the
event there are no free pages in the pageblock then the lock will not be
acquired at all which reduces contention on zone->lock.

Change-Id: Iaf8b30f94e43b03ac93d751b7b97dbe0b76b87af
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Richard Davies <richard@arachsys.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Peter Ujfalusi <peter.ujfalusi@ti.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: f40d1e42bb988d2a26e8e111ea4c4c7bac819b7e
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>
mm: compaction: cache if a pageblock was scanned and no pages were isolated

When compaction was implemented it was known that scanning could
potentially be excessive.  The ideal was that a counter be maintained for
each pageblock but maintaining this information would incur a severe
penalty due to a shared writable cache line.  It has reached the point
where the scanning costs are a serious problem, particularly on
long-lived systems where a large process starts and allocates a large
number of THPs at the same time.

Instead of using a shared counter, this patch adds another bit to the
pageblock flags called PG_migrate_skip.  If a pageblock is scanned by
either migrate or free scanner and 0 pages were isolated, the pageblock is
marked to be skipped in the future.  When scanning, this bit is checked
before any scanning takes place and the block skipped if set.

The main difficulty with a patch like this is "when to ignore the cached
information?" If it's ignored too often, the scanning rates will still be
excessive.  If the information is too stale then allocations will fail
that might have otherwise succeeded.  In this patch

o CMA always ignores the information
o If the migrate and free scanner meet then the cached information will
  be discarded if it's at least 5 seconds since the last time the cache
  was discarded
o If there are a large number of allocation failures, discard the cache.

The time-based heuristic is very clumsy but there are few choices for a
better event.  Depending solely on multiple allocation failures still
allows excessive scanning when THP allocations are failing in quick
succession due to memory pressure.  Waiting until memory pressure is
relieved would cause compaction to continually fail instead of using
reclaim/compaction to try allocate the page.  The time-based mechanism is
clumsy but a better option is not obvious.

Change-Id: I17a4887aca9bb3d2d9d3756089ad7c9b89922727
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Richard Davies <richard@arachsys.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@mina86.com>
Cc: Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <b.zolnierkie@samsung.com>
Cc: Kyungmin Park <kyungmin.park@samsung.com>
Cc: Mark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: bb13ffeb9f6bfeb301443994dfbf29f91117dfb3
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
[lauraa@codeaurora.org: Context fixup due to merging patches out of order]
Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>
mm: cma: WARN if freed memory is still in use

Memory returned to free_contig_range() must have no other references.
Let kernel to complain loudly if page reference count is not equal to 1.

Change-Id: If1b84bb383d97eff441d7a1e18b874c64b7f5f85
[rientjes@google.com: support sparsemem]
Signed-off-by: Marek Szyprowski <m.szyprowski@samsung.com>
Reviewed-by: Kyungmin Park <kyungmin.park@samsung.com>
Acked-by: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@mina86.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: bcc2b02f4c1b36bc67272df7119b75bac78525ab
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>
mm: do not use page_count() without a page pin

d179e84ba ("mm: vmscan: do not use page_count without a page pin") fixed
this problem in vmscan.c but same problem is in __count_immobile_pages().

I copy and paste d179e84ba's contents for description.

"It is unsafe to run page_count during the physical pfn scan because
compound_head could trip on a dangling pointer when reading
page->first_page if the compound page is being freed by another CPU."

Change-Id: I2b620c07adfa2c5a0f56219a11c042dc97428085
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Wanpeng Li <liwp.linux@gmail.com>
Cc: Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <b.zolnierkie@samsung.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: 97d255c816946388bab504122937730d3447c612
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>
mm: clean up __count_immobile_pages()

The __count_immobile_pages() naming is rather awkward.  Choose a more
clear name and add a comment.

Change-Id: Ic1d8573bbc7eaa82dd5e3f9a1199ee6dd4ac9fc0
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <b.zolnierkie@samsung.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Git-commit: 80934513b230bfcf70265f2ef0fdae89fb391633
Git-repo: git://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
Signed-off-by: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>