Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 14 Jul 2016 09:51:53 +0100 | From | Mel Gorman <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] mm: fix pgalloc_stall on unpopulated zone |
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On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 10:11:19AM +0900, Minchan Kim wrote: > > The patch means that the vmstat accounting and tracepoint data is also > > out of sync. One thing I wanted to be able to do was > > > > 1. Observe that there are alloc stalls on DMA32 or some other low zone > > 2. Activate mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_begin, filter on classzone_idx == > > DMA32 and identify the source of the lowmem allocations > > > > If your patch is applied, I cannot depend on the stall stats any more > > and the tracepoint is required to determine if there really any > > zone-contrained allocations. It can be *inferred* from the skip stats > > but only if such skips occurred and that is not guaranteed. > > Just a nit: > > Hmm, can't we omit classzone_idx in mm_vm_scan_direct_begin_template? > Because every functions already have gfp_flags so that we can classzone_idx > via gfp_zone(gfp_flags) without passing it. >
We could but it's potentially wrong. classzone_idx *should* be derived from the gfp_flags but it's possible a bug would lead it to be another value. The saving from passing it in is marginal at best.
If it's omitted from the tracepoint itself, there is a small amount of disk saving which is potentially significant if there is a lot of direct reclaim. Unfortunately, it also makes it harder to filter that tracepoint because the filter rules must be an implementation of gfp_zone.
Right now I believe the saving is marginal and the cost of potentially using the wrong information or making the filtering harder offsets that marginal saving.
-- Mel Gorman SUSE Labs
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