Re: [PATCH RFC 1/1] mm, page_alloc: fix incorrect zone_statistics data

[Mel Gorman]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 01:59:07PM +0800, Jia He wrote:
> In commit b9f00e147f27 ("mm, page_alloc: reduce branches in
> zone_statistics"), it reconstructed codes to reduce the branch miss rate.
> Compared with the original logic, it assumed if !(flag & __GFP_OTHER_NODE)
>  z->node would not be equal to preferred_zone->node. That seems to be
> incorrect.
> 
> Fixes: commit b9f00e147f27 ("mm, page_alloc: reduce branches in
> zone_statistics")
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jia He <hejianet@xxxxxxxxx>

This is slightly curious. It appear it would only occur if a process was
running on a node that was outside the memory policy. Can you confirm
that is the case?

If so, your patch is a a semantic curiousity because it's actually
impossible for a NUMA allocation to be local and the definition of "HIT"
is fuzzy enough to be useless.

I won't object to the patch but it makes me trust "hit" even less than I
already do for any analysis.

Note that after this mail that I'll be unavailable by mail until early
new years.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs