On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:39:38 +0100
Mel Gorman [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 02:36:56PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:

quoted

Also, what has to be done to avoid the polling altogether?  eg/ie, zap
a pageblock's PB_migrate_skip synchronously, when something was done to
that pageblock which justifies repolling it?

The "something" event you are looking for is pages being freed or
allocated in the page allocator. A movable page being allocated in block
or a page being freed should clear the PB_migrate_skip bit if it's set.
Unfortunately this would impact the fast path of the alloc and free paths
of the page allocator. I felt that that was too high a price to pay.

We already do a similar thing in the page allocator: clearing of
->all_unreclaimable and ->pages_scanned.  But that isn't on the "fast
path" really - it happens once per pcp unload.  Can we do something
like that?  Drop some hint into the zone without having to visit each
page?

quoted

quoted

...

+static void reset_isolation_suitable(struct zone *zone)
+{
+	unsigned long start_pfn = zone->zone_start_pfn;
+	unsigned long end_pfn = zone->zone_start_pfn + zone->spanned_pages;
+	unsigned long pfn;
+
+	/*
+	 * Do not reset more than once every five seconds. If allocations are
+	 * failing sufficiently quickly to allow this to happen then continually
+	 * scanning for compaction is not going to help. The choice of five
+	 * seconds is arbitrary but will mitigate excessive scanning.
+	 */
+	if (time_before(jiffies, zone->compact_blockskip_expire))
+		return;
+	zone->compact_blockskip_expire = jiffies + (HZ * 5);
+
+	/* Walk the zone and mark every pageblock as suitable for isolation */
+	for (pfn = start_pfn; pfn < end_pfn; pfn += pageblock_nr_pages) {
+		struct page *page;
+		if (!pfn_valid(pfn))
+			continue;
+
+		page = pfn_to_page(pfn);
+		if (zone != page_zone(page))
+			continue;
+
+		clear_pageblock_skip(page);
+	}

What's the worst-case loop count here?

zone->spanned_pages >> pageblock_order

What's the worst-case value of (zone->spanned_pages >> pageblock_order) :)

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