Re: [PATCH V2 2/3] mm: page_alloc: correct high atomic reserve calculations

[Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>]

On Sun, Nov 05, 2023 at 06:20:49PM +0530, Charan Teja Kalla wrote:
> reserve_highatomic_pageblock() aims to reserve the 1% of the managed
> pages of a zone, which is used for the high order atomic allocations.
> 
> It uses the below calculation to reserve:
> static void reserve_highatomic_pageblock(struct page *page, ....) {
> 
>    .......
>    max_managed = (zone_managed_pages(zone) / 100) + pageblock_nr_pages;
> 
>    if (zone->nr_reserved_highatomic >= max_managed)
>        goto out;
> 
>    zone->nr_reserved_highatomic += pageblock_nr_pages;
>    set_pageblock_migratetype(page, MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC);
>    move_freepages_block(zone, page, MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC, NULL);
> 
> out:
>    ....
> }
> 
> Since we are always appending the 1% of zone managed pages count to
> pageblock_nr_pages, the minimum it is turning into 2 pageblocks as the
> nr_reserved_highatomic is incremented/decremented in pageblock sizes.
> 
> Encountered a system(actually a VM running on the Linux kernel) with the
> below zone configuration:
> Normal free:7728kB boost:0kB min:804kB low:1004kB high:1204kB
> reserved_highatomic:8192KB managed:49224kB
> 
> The existing calculations making it to reserve the 8MB(with pageblock
> size of 4MB) i.e. 16% of the zone managed memory.  Reserving such high
> amount of memory can easily exert memory pressure in the system thus may
> lead into unnecessary reclaims till unreserving of high atomic reserves.
> 
> Since high atomic reserves are managed in pageblock size granules, as
> MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC is set for such pageblock, fix the calculations for
> high atomic reserves as,  minimum is pageblock size , maximum is
> approximately 1% of the zone managed pages.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Charan Teja Kalla <quic_charante@quicinc.com>

This patch in isolation seems fine with the caveat that such a small
system may find the atomic reserves to be borderline useless.

Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs