Re: [PATCH] mm: test page->flags directly in page_lru()

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 03:34:16PM -0700, Yu Zhao wrote:
> > If only somebody were working on a patch series to get rid of
> > all those calls to compound_head()!  Some reviews on
> > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210128070404.1922318-2-willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/
> > would be nice.
> 
> I'm on board with the idea and have done some research in this
> direction. We've found that the ideal *anon* page size for Chrome OS
> is not 4KB or 2MB, but 32KB. I hope we could leverage the folio to
> support flexible anon page size to reduce the number of page faults
> (vs 4KB) or internal fragmentation (vs 2MB).
> 
> That being said, it seems to me this is a long term plan and right
> now we need something smaller. So if you don't mind, I'll just go
> ahead and remove compound_head() from Page{LRU,Active,Unevictable,
> SwapBacked} first?

It's really not a big change I'm suggesting here.  You need
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210128070404.1922318-2-willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210128070404.1922318-5-willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210128070404.1922318-8-willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/
and then the patch I sent above to create folio_lru().

Then any changes you want to make to use folios more broadly will
incrementally move us towards your goal of 32kB anon pages.