[PATCH 06/22] mm, migrate: Immediately fail migration of a page with no migration handler

From: Mel Gorman
Date: Fri Jan 18 2019 - 12:52:52 EST


Pages with no migration handler use a fallback handler which sometimes
works and sometimes persistently retries. A historical example was blockdev
pages but there are others such as odd refcounting when page->private
is used. These are retried multiple times which is wasteful during
compaction so this patch will fail migration faster unless the caller
specifies MIGRATE_SYNC.

This is not expected to help THP allocation success rates but it did
reduce latencies very slightly in some cases.

1-socket thpfioscale
4.20.0 4.20.0
noreserved-v2r15 failfast-v2r15
Amean fault-both-1 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 * 0.00%*
Amean fault-both-3 3839.67 ( 0.00%) 3833.72 ( 0.15%)
Amean fault-both-5 5177.47 ( 0.00%) 4967.15 ( 4.06%)
Amean fault-both-7 7245.03 ( 0.00%) 7139.19 ( 1.46%)
Amean fault-both-12 11534.89 ( 0.00%) 11326.30 ( 1.81%)
Amean fault-both-18 16241.10 ( 0.00%) 16270.70 ( -0.18%)
Amean fault-both-24 19075.91 ( 0.00%) 19839.65 ( -4.00%)
Amean fault-both-30 22712.11 ( 0.00%) 21707.05 ( 4.43%)
Amean fault-both-32 21692.92 ( 0.00%) 21968.16 ( -1.27%)

The 2-socket results are not materially different. Scan rates are similar
as expected.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>
---
mm/migrate.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/migrate.c b/mm/migrate.c
index 52b04c217e30..4512afab46ac 100644
--- a/mm/migrate.c
+++ b/mm/migrate.c
@@ -916,7 +916,7 @@ static int fallback_migrate_page(struct address_space *mapping,
*/
if (page_has_private(page) &&
!try_to_release_page(page, GFP_KERNEL))
- return -EAGAIN;
+ return mode == MIGRATE_SYNC ? -EAGAIN : -EBUSY;

return migrate_page(mapping, newpage, page, mode);
}
--
2.16.4