[PATCH] fix page_alloc for larger I/O segments

[Mark Lord <liml@rtr.ca>]

Mark Lord wrote:
> Mark Lord wrote:
> > Mark Lord wrote:
> > > Mark Lord wrote:
> > > > Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > > On Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:15:06 -0500
> > > > > James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 14:02 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > > > > On Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:09:59 +0100
> > > > > > > Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com> wrote:
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > > OK, it's a vm issue,
> > > > > > > cc linux-mm and probable culprit.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > >  I have tens of thousand "backward" pages after a
> > > > > > > > boot - IOW, bvec->bv_page is the page before bvprv->bv_page, not
> > > > > > > > reverse. So it looks like that bug got reintroduced.
> > > > > > > Bill Irwin fixed this a couple of years back: changed the page 
> > > > > > > allocator so
> > > > > > > that it mostly hands out pages in ascending physical-address order.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > I guess we broke that, quite possibly in Mel's page allocator 
> > > > > > > rework.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > It would help if you could provide us with a simple recipe for
> > > > > > > demonstrating this problem, please.
> > > > > > The simple way seems to be to malloc a large area, touch every 
> > > > > > page and
> > > > > > then look at the physical pages assigned ... they now mostly seem 
> > > > > > to be
> > > > > > descending in physical address.
> > > > >
> > > > > OIC.  -mm's /proc/pid/pagemap can be used to get the pfn's...
> > > > ..
> > > >
> > > > I'm actually running the treadmill right now (have been for many 
> > > > hours, actually,
> > > > to bisect it to a specific commit.
> > > >
> > > > Thought I was almost done, and then noticed that git-bisect doesn't 
> > > > keep
> > > > the Makefile VERSION lines the same, so I was actually running the 
> > > > wrong
> > > > kernel after the first few times.. duh.
> > > >
> > > > Wrote a script to fix it now.
> > > ..
> > >
> > > Well, that was a waste of three hours.
> > ..
> >
> > Ahh.. it seems to be sensitive to one/both of these:
> >
> > CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G=y with 4GB RAM:  not so bad, frequently does 20KB - 
> > 48KB segments.
> > CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y  with 2GB RAM:  very severe, rarely does more than 
> > 8KB segments.
> > CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y  with 3GB RAM:  very severe, rarely does more than 
> > 8KB segments.
> >
> > So if you want to reproduce this on a large memory machine, use 
> > "mem=2GB" for starters.
> ..
>
> Here's the commit that causes the regression:
>
> 535131e6925b4a95f321148ad7293f496e0e58d7 Choose pages from the per-cpu 
> list based on migration type

And here is a patch that seems to fix it for me here:

* * * *

Fix page allocator to give better change of larger contiguous segments (again).

Signed-off-by: Mark Lord <mlord@pobox.com
---


--- old/mm/page_alloc.c.orig	2007-12-13 19:25:15.000000000 -0500
+++ linux-2.6/mm/page_alloc.c	2007-12-13 19:35:50.000000000 -0500
@@ -954,7 +954,7 @@
				goto failed;
		}
		/* Find a page of the appropriate migrate type */
-		list_for_each_entry(page, &pcp->list, lru) {
+		list_for_each_entry_reverse(page, &pcp->list, lru) {
			if (page_private(page) == migratetype) {
				list_del(&page->lru);
				pcp->count--;
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