mm: proactive compaction
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. For a more proactive compaction, the approach taken here is to define a new sysctl called 'vm.compaction_proactiveness' which dictates bounds for external fragmentation which kcompactd tries to maintain. The tunable takes a value in range [0, 100], with a default of 20. Note that a previous version of this patch [1] wa...
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