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mm: page_alloc: do not give all non-blocking requests reserve access - #2656

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Series: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-fsdevel/list/?series=1170459
Submitter: Johannes Weiner
Version: 1
Patches: 2/2
Message-ID: <arFBWvzXPYrKuIYi@cmpxchg.org>
Base: vfs.base.ci
Lore: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/arFBWvzXPYrKuIYi@cmpxchg.org


Automated by ml2pr

…ations

Commit 5d8edfb ("iomap: Copy larger chunks from userspace")
introduced high-order folio allocations in the iomap buffered write
path.  When memory is fragmented, each failed costly-order allocation
enters __alloc_pages_slowpath() which runs direct compaction and
drain_all_pages(), causing a 0.38x throughput drop on PostgreSQL
pgbench (simple-update) with 1024 clients on a 96-vCPU arm64 system.

The root issue is that direct compaction is too expensive for hot
allocation paths that have fallbacks to smaller allocations.
__filemap_get_folio_mpol() already marks higher-order allocations with
__GFP_NORETRY | __GFP_NOWARN, signalling that the caller can handle
failure.  However, the page allocator still attempts full direct
compaction for costly orders with __GFP_NORETRY, which is unnecessarily
aggressive when the caller will simply retry at a lower order.

For costly-order allocations with __GFP_NORETRY, clear
__GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM at the very start of the slowpath, before
can_direct_reclaim, can_compact and the nofail checks are evaluated.
This makes the entire slowpath treat the request as non-blocking: no
direct reclaim, no direct compaction and no drain_all_pages() IPI
across every CPU. kswapd (and in turn kcompactd) is still woken further
down for background defragmentation, so compaction keeps working for
long-term system health while being removed from the latency-critical
direct allocation path.

Allocations that also request __GFP_THISNODE are exempted.  That flag
pairing identifies the local-node-first THP attempt issued by
alloc_pages_mpol() (mempolicy.c), which relies on direct compaction to
form transparent huge pages.

Test environment:
  Hardware:  AWS EC2 m8g.24xlarge (96 vCPU, arm64)
             12x 1TB IO2 32000 IOPS RAID0 XFS
  OS:        AL2023
  Kernel:    v7.3-rc1
  Database:  PostgreSQL 18.4
  Workload:  pgbench simple-update, 1024 clients, 96 threads, 1200s

Results (average of 3 runs, TPS):

  Config                   Avg TPS      % vs Baseline
  baseline (no patch)       59,408       -
  With this patch          155,409      +161.6%

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260403193535.9970-1-dipiets@amazon.it/T/#t [v1]
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20260420161404.642-1-dipiets@amazon.it/T/#u [v2]
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260710143437.12379-1-dipiets@amazon.it/T/#u [v3]
Fixes: 5d8edfb ("iomap: Copy larger chunks from userspace")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Dave Chinner <dgc@kernel.org>
Cc: Ritesh Harjani <ritesh.list@gmail.com>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Cc: linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Salvatore Dipietro <dipiets@amazon.it>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20260904115629.3993331-1-dipiets@amazon.it
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Zi Yan <ziy@nvidia.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka (SUSE) <vbabka@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
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