Re: [PATCH v3 3/7] mm, slab: allocate off-slab freelists as reclaimable when appropriate

[Mel Gorman]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 03:36:16PM +0200, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> In SLAB, OFF_SLAB caches allocate management structures (currently just the
> freelist) from kmalloc caches when placement in a slab page together with
> objects would lead to suboptimal memory usage. For SLAB_RECLAIM_ACCOUNT caches,
> we can allocate the freelists from the newly introduced reclaimable kmalloc
> caches, because shrinking the OFF_SLAB cache will in general result to freeing
> of the freelists as well. This should improve accounting and anti-fragmentation
> a bit.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx>

I'm not quite convinced by this one. The freelist cache is tied to the
lifetime of the slab and not the objects. A single freelist can be reclaimed
eventually but for caches with many objects per slab, it could take a lot
of shrinking random objects to reclaim one freelist. Functionally the
patch appears to be fine.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs