Re: [PATCH 24/27] mm, page_alloc: Remove fair zone allocation policy
From: Vlastimil Babka
Date: Fri Jun 17 2016 - 07:27:19 EST
On 06/09/2016 08:04 PM, Mel Gorman wrote:
The fair zone allocation policy interleaves allocation requests between
zones to avoid an age inversion problem whereby new pages are reclaimed
to balance a zone. Reclaim is now node-based so this should no longer be
an issue and the fair zone allocation policy is not free. This patch
removes it.
I wonder if fair zone allocation had the side effect of preventing e.g. a small
Normal zone to be almost fully occupied by long-lived unreclaimable allocations
early in the kernel lifetime. So that might be one thing to watch out for. But
otherwise I would agree it should be no longer needed with node-based reclaim.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>