Commit 453f85d4 authored by Mel Gorman's avatar Mel Gorman Committed by Linus Torvalds
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mm: remove __GFP_COLD

As the page free path makes no distinction between cache hot and cold
pages, there is no real useful ordering of pages in the free list that
allocation requests can take advantage of.  Juding from the users of
__GFP_COLD, it is likely that a number of them are the result of copying
other sites instead of actually measuring the impact.  Remove the
__GFP_COLD parameter which simplifies a number of paths in the page
allocator.

This is potentially controversial but bear in mind that the size of the
per-cpu pagelists versus modern cache sizes means that the whole per-cpu
list can often fit in the L3 cache.  Hence, there is only a potential
benefit for microbenchmarks that alloc/free pages in a tight loop.  It's
even worse when THP is taken into account which has little or no chance
of getting a cache-hot page as the per-cpu list is bypassed and the
zeroing of multiple pages will thrash the cache anyway.

The truncate microbenchmarks are not shown as this patch affects the
allocation path...
parent 2d4894b5
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