thp: _GFP_NO_KSWAPD

Transparent hugepage allocations must be allowed not to invoke kswapd or
any other kind of indirect reclaim (especially when the defrag sysfs is
control disabled).  It's unacceptable to swap out anonymous pages
(potentially anonymous transparent hugepages) in order to create new
transparent hugepages.  This is true for the MADV_HUGEPAGE areas too
(swapping out a kvm virtual machine and so having it suffer an unbearable
slowdown, so another one with guest physical memory marked MADV_HUGEPAGE
can run 30% faster if it is running memory intensive workloads, makes no
sense).  If a transparent hugepage allocation fails the slowdown is minor
and there is total fallback, so kswapd should never be asked to swapout
memory to allow the high order allocation to succeed.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 6e62d5f9d40b..bbd0423f2820 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -2027,7 +2027,8 @@ __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
                 goto nopage;
 
 restart:
-        wake_all_kswapd(order, zonelist, high_zoneidx,
+        if (!(gfp_mask & __GFP_NO_KSWAPD))
+                wake_all_kswapd(order, zonelist, high_zoneidx,
                                                 zone_idx(preferred_zone));
 
         /*