Commit facdaa91 authored by Nitin Gupta's avatar Nitin Gupta Committed by Linus Torvalds
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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...
parent 471e78cc
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