Re: [PATCH V7] Allow compaction of unevictable pages

On Fri, 20 Mar 2015 09:49:50 -0400 Eric B Munson [off-list ref] wrote:

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 that 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.

Do we really really really need the /proc knob?  We're already
migrating these pages so users of mlock will occasionally see some
latency - how likely is it that this patch will significantly damage
anyone?