Re: [PATCH 2/3] mm, compaction: split off flag for not updating skip hints

[Mel Gorman]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2017 at 01:17:05PM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> Pageblock skip hints were added as a heuristic for compaction, which shares
> core code with CMA. Since CMA reliability would suffer from the heuristics,
> compact_control flag ignore_skip_hint was added for the CMA use case.
> Since commit 6815bf3f233e ("mm/compaction: respect ignore_skip_hint in
> update_pageblock_skip") the flag also means that CMA won't *update* the skip
> hints in addition to ignoring them.
> 
> Today, direct compaction can also ignore the skip hints in the last resort
> attempt, but there's no reason not to set them when isolation fails in such
> case. Thus, this patch splits off a new no_set_skip_hint flag to avoid the
> updating, which only CMA sets. This should improve the heuristics a bit, and
> allow us to simplify the persistent skip bit handling as the next step.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs