Re: [PATCH v6] mm: Proactive compaction

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 12:48 PM Nitin Gupta [off-list ref] wrote:

For some applications, we need to allocate almost all memory as
hugepages. However, on a running system, higher-order allocations can
fail if the memory is fragmented. Linux kernel currently does on-demand
compaction as we request more hugepages, but this style of compaction
incurs very high latency. Experiments with one-time full memory
compaction (followed by hugepage allocations) show that kernel is able
to restore a highly fragmented memory state to a fairly compacted memory
state within <1 sec for a 32G system. Such data suggests that a more
proactive compaction can help us allocate a large fraction of memory as
hugepages keeping allocation latencies low.

Signed-off-by: Nitin Gupta <redacted>
Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka <redacted>

(+CC Khalid)

Can this be pipelined for upstream inclusion now? Sorry, I'm a bit
rusty on upstream flow these days.

Thanks,
Nitin