On Tue, 12 Jun 2018, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> The __alloc_pages_slowpath() function has for a long time contained code to
> ignore node restrictions from memory policies for high priority allocations.
> The current code that resets the zonelist iterator however does effectively
> nothing after commit 7810e6781e0f ("mm, page_alloc: do not break
> __GFP_THISNODE
> by zonelist reset") removed a buggy zonelist reset. Even before that commit,
> mempolicy restrictions were still not ignored, as they are passed in
> ac->nodemask which is untouched by the code.
>
> We can either remove the code, or make it work as intended. Since
> ac->nodemask can be set from task's mempolicy via alloc_pages_current() and
> thus also alloc_pages(), it may indeed affect kernel allocations, and it makes
> sense to ignore it to allow progress for high priority allocations.
>
> Thus, this patch resets ac->nodemask to NULL in such cases. This assumes all
> callers can handle it (i.e. there are no guarantees as in the case of
> __GFP_THISNODE) which seems to be the case. The same assumption is already
> present in check_retry_cpuset() for some time.
>
> The expected effect is that high priority kernel allocations in the context of
> userspace tasks (e.g. OOM victims) restricted by mempolicies will have higher
> chance to succeed if they are restricted to nodes with depleted memory, while
> there are other nodes with free memory left.
>
Hi Vlastimil,
Is this expected as a change back to previous behavior that we have lost
or is this new development for high priority allocations? I don't think
we have ignored mempolicies for things like GFP_ATOMIC allocations in the
past.
> Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vba...@suse.cz>
> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgor...@techsingularity.net>
> Cc: Michal Hocko <mho...@kernel.org>
> Cc: David Rientjes <rient...@google.com>
> Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo....@lge.com>
> ---
> mm/page_alloc.c | 7 ++++---
> 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> index 07b3c23762ad..ec8c92ff8b3c 100644
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -4164,11 +4164,12 @@ __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int
> order,
> alloc_flags = reserve_flags;
>
> /*
> - * Reset the zonelist iterators if memory policies can be ignored.
> - * These allocations are high priority and system rather than user
> - * orientated.
> + * Reset the nodemask and zonelist iterators if memory policies can be
> + * ignored. These allocations are high priority and system rather than
> + * user oriented.
> */
> if (!(alloc_flags & ALLOC_CPUSET) || reserve_flags) {
> + ac->nodemask = NULL;
> ac->preferred_zoneref = first_zones_zonelist(ac->zonelist,
> ac->high_zoneidx, ac->nodemask);
> }
