The primary purpose of watermarks is to ensure that reclaim can always
make forward progress in PF_MEMALLOC context (kswapd and direct reclaim).
These assume that order-0 allocations are all that is necessary for
forward progress.
High-order watermarks serve a different purpose. Kswapd had no high-order
awareness before they were introduced
(https://lkml.kernel.org/r/413AA7B2.4000907@yahoo.com.au). This was
particularly important when there were high-order atomic requests. The
watermarks both gave kswapd awareness and made a reserve for those atomic
requests.
There are two important side-effects of this. The most important is that
a non-atomic high-order request can fail even though free pages are
available and the order-0 watermarks are ok. The second is that
high-order watermark checks are expensive as the free list counts up to
the requested order must be examined.
With the introduction of MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC it is no longer necessary to
have high-order watermarks. Kswapd and compaction still need high-order
awareness which is handled by checking that at least one suitable
high-order page is free.
With the patch applied, there was little difference in the allocation
failure rates as the atomic reserves are small relative to the number of
allocation attempts. The expected impact is that there will never be an
allocation failure report that shows suitable pages on the free lists.
The one potential side-effect of this is that in a vanilla kernel, the
watermark checks may have kept a free page for an atomic allocation. Now,
we are 100% relying on the HighAtomic reserves and an early allocation to
have allocated them. If the first high-order atomic allocation is after
the system is already heavily fragmented then it'll fail.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: simplify __zone_watermark_ok(), per Vlastimil]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Vitaly Wool <vitalywool@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
97a16fc82a