On 10 Sep 2020, at 9:32, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Thu, 2020-09-10 at 09:32 +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
>> [Cc Vlastimil and Mel - the whole email thread starts
>> http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200902180628.4052244-1-zi.yan@sent.com
>>  but this particular subthread has diverged a bit and you might find
>> it
>>  interesting]
>>
>> On Wed 09-09-20 15:43:55, David Hildenbrand wrote:
>>>
>>> I am not sure I like the trend towards CMA that we are seeing,
>>> reserving
>>> huge buffers for specific users (and eventually even doing it
>>> automatically).
>>>
>>> What we actually want is ZONE_MOVABLE with relaxed guarantees, such
>>> that
>>> anybody who requires large, unmovable allocations can use it.
>>>
>>> I once played with the idea of having ZONE_PREFER_MOVABLE, which
>>> a) Is the primary choice for movable allocations
>>> b) Is allowed to contain unmovable allocations (esp., gigantic
>>> pages)
>>> c) Is the fallback for ZONE_NORMAL for unmovable allocations,
>>> instead of
>>> running out of memory
>>
>> I might be missing something but how can this work longterm? Or put
>> in
>> another words why would this work any better than existing
>> fragmentation
>> avoidance techniques that page allocator implements already -
>
> One big difference is reclaim. If ZONE_NORMAL runs low on
> free memory, page reclaim would kick in and evict some
> movable/reclaimable things, to free up more space for
> unmovable allocations.
>
> The current fragmentation avoidance techniques don't do
> things like reclaim, or proactively migrating movable
> pages out of unmovable page blocks to prevent unmovable
> allocations in currently movable page blocks.

Isn’t Mel Gorman’s watermark boost patch[1] (merged about a year ago)
doing what you are describing?


[1]https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20181123114528.28802-1-mgorman@techsingularity.net/


—
Best Regards,
Yan Zi