From: JP Kobryn Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2026 06:17:25 +0000 (-0700) Subject: mm/compaction: cap compact_gap() at COMPACT_CLUSTER_MAX X-Git-Url: http://git.ipfire.org/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=32a2b73ec232b284b029d34bcfaa9a7f424151d2;p=thirdparty%2Fkernel%2Fstable.git mm/compaction: cap compact_gap() at COMPACT_CLUSTER_MAX compact_gap() returns 2 << order, which is used as watermark headroom in __compaction_suitable() and as a threshold in kswapd reclaim decisions. The computed value scales exponentially by order. For order-9 THP allocations this evaluates to 1024 pages, but the compaction free scanner's working set is bounded by COMPACT_CLUSTER_MAX (32 pages). The scanner stops isolating free pages once it matches the migration batch. The current gap over-reserves by 32x. On fragmented production hosts, kswapd will try to reclaim up to the gap, but it only reaches that threshold in 18% of attempts. As a result, reclaim continues in the majority of cases despite many lower-order free pages being available. The over-sized gap also causes 46% of order-9 compaction suitability checks to fail unnecessarily: the zone has sufficient free pages for the scanner to operate, but not enough to clear the inflated threshold. Cap compact_gap() at COMPACT_CLUSTER_MAX so the watermark headroom reflects the scanner's actual capacity. This function is used by two key heuristics. The first is when kswapd can stop high-order reclaim and downgrade to order-0 balancing, allowing kcompactd to be woken for the original higher allocation order. The second is zone suitability checking, where the smaller gap allows compaction to start sooner. Note that orders 0-4 are unaffected since their gap is already less than or equal to COMPACT_CLUSTER_MAX. A/B test on v6.13-based instagram production hosts (64GB, 60s measurement): Unpatched (43 hosts) pgscan_kswapd (mean/host): ~1.6M reclaim efficiency (steal/scan): 83.8% per-compaction success (success/stall): 2.1% THP success (alloc/alloc+fallback): 4.9% forced lru_add_drain (mean/host): ~107K Patched (59 hosts) pgscan_kswapd (mean/host): ~449K reclaim efficiency (steal/scan): 91.0% per-compaction success (success/stall): 28.3% THP success (alloc/alloc+fallback): 17.2% forced lru_add_drain (mean/host): ~64K Additional tests were also performed using a workload of similar shape and based on mm-new at the time of testing. Across three 60s runs, the patch showed improvements consistent with the previous test: reduced kswapd reclaim and fewer THP fault fallbacks. Unpatched kswapd_shrink_node downgrade to order-0 (mean): 0 thp_fault_fallback (mean): 1217 pgscan_kswapd (mean): 6328 pgsteal_kswapd (mean): 5657 Patched kswapd_shrink_node downgrade to order-0 (mean): 28 thp_fault_fallback (mean): 738 pgscan_kswapd (mean): 3773 pgsteal_kswapd (mean): 3243 Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20260604061725.13800-1-jp.kobryn@linux.dev Signed-off-by: JP Kobryn (Meta) Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka (SUSE) Cc: Brendan Jackman Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: Michal Hocko Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan Cc: Zi Yan Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- diff --git a/include/linux/compaction.h b/include/linux/compaction.h index c829c48d1c71..f29ef0653546 100644 --- a/include/linux/compaction.h +++ b/include/linux/compaction.h @@ -2,6 +2,8 @@ #ifndef _LINUX_COMPACTION_H #define _LINUX_COMPACTION_H +#include + /* * Determines how hard direct compaction should try to succeed. * Lower value means higher priority, analogically to reclaim priority. @@ -73,11 +75,9 @@ static inline unsigned long compact_gap(unsigned int order) * effectively limited by COMPACT_CLUSTER_MAX, as that's the maximum * that the migrate scanner can have isolated on migrate list, and free * scanner is only invoked when the number of isolated free pages is - * lower than that. But it's not worth to complicate the formula here - * as a bigger gap for higher orders than strictly necessary can also - * improve chances of compaction success. + * lower than that. */ - return 2UL << order; + return min(2UL << order, COMPACT_CLUSTER_MAX); } static inline int current_is_kcompactd(void) diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c index e8a90911bf88..3f3ff25e561a 100644 --- a/mm/vmscan.c +++ b/mm/vmscan.c @@ -7014,7 +7014,7 @@ static bool kswapd_shrink_node(pg_data_t *pgdat, /* * Fragmentation may mean that the system cannot be rebalanced for - * high-order allocations. If twice the allocation size has been + * high-order allocations. If at least the compaction gap has been * reclaimed then recheck watermarks only at order-0 to prevent * excessive reclaim. Assume that a process requested a high-order * can direct reclaim/compact.