Re: [PATCH 1/7] mm: page_alloc: exclude unreclaimable allocations from zone fairness policy

[Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>]

On 12/13/2013 09:10 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
> From: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
> 
> Dave Hansen noted a regression in a microbenchmark that loops around
> open() and close() on an 8-node NUMA machine and bisected it down to
> 81c0a2bb515f ("mm: page_alloc: fair zone allocator policy").  That
> change forces the slab allocations of the file descriptor to spread
> out to all 8 nodes, causing remote references in the page allocator
> and slab.
> 
> The round-robin policy is only there to provide fairness among memory
> allocations that are reclaimed involuntarily based on pressure in each
> zone.  It does not make sense to apply it to unreclaimable kernel
> allocations that are freed manually, in this case instantly after the
> allocation, and incur the remote reference costs twice for no reason.
> 
> Only round-robin allocations that are usually freed through page
> reclaim or slab shrinking.
> 
> Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
> Bisected-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
> Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>

Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>

-- 
All rights reversed