[PATCH 0/8] mm: page_alloc: freelist migratetype hygiene

[Johannes Weiner]

This is a breakout series from the huge page allocator patches[1].

While testing and benchmarking the series incrementally, as per
reviewer request, it became apparent that there are several sources of
freelist migratetype violations that later patches in the series hid.

Those violations occur when pages of one migratetype end up on the
freelists of another type. This encourages incompatible page mixing
down the line, where allocation requests ask for one migrate type, but
receives pages of another. This defeats the mobility grouping.

The series addresses those causes. The last patch adds type checks on
all freelist movements to rule out any violations. I used these checks
to identify the violations fixed up in the preceding patches.

The series is a breakout, but has merit on its own: Less type mixing
means improved grouping, means less work for compaction, means higher
THP success rate and lower allocation latencies. The results can be
seen in a mixed workload that stresses the machine with a kernel build
job while periodically attempting to allocate batches of THP. The data
is averaged over 50 consecutive defconfig builds:

                                                        VANILLA      PATCHED-CLEANLISTS
Hugealloc Time median                     14642.00 (    +0.00%)   10506.00 (   -28.25%)
Hugealloc Time min                         4820.00 (    +0.00%)    4783.00 (    -0.77%)
Hugealloc Time max                      6786868.00 (    +0.00%) 6556624.00 (    -3.39%)
Kbuild Real time                            240.03 (    +0.00%)     241.45 (    +0.59%)
Kbuild User time                           1195.49 (    +0.00%)    1195.69 (    +0.02%)
Kbuild System time                           96.44 (    +0.00%)      97.03 (    +0.61%)
THP fault alloc                           11490.00 (    +0.00%)   11802.30 (    +2.72%)
THP fault fallback                          782.62 (    +0.00%)     478.88 (   -38.76%)
THP fault fail rate %                         6.38 (    +0.00%)       3.90 (   -33.52%)
Direct compact stall                        297.70 (    +0.00%)     224.56 (   -24.49%)
Direct compact fail                         265.98 (    +0.00%)     191.56 (   -27.87%)
Direct compact success                       31.72 (    +0.00%)      33.00 (    +3.91%)
Direct compact success rate %                13.11 (    +0.00%)      17.26 (   +29.43%)
Compact daemon scanned migrate          1673661.58 (    +0.00%) 1591682.18 (    -4.90%)
Compact daemon scanned free             2711252.80 (    +0.00%) 2615217.78 (    -3.54%)
Compact direct scanned migrate           384998.62 (    +0.00%)  261689.42 (   -32.03%)
Compact direct scanned free              966308.94 (    +0.00%)  667459.76 (   -30.93%)
Compact migrate scanned daemon %             80.86 (    +0.00%)      83.34 (    +3.02%)
Compact free scanned daemon %                74.41 (    +0.00%)      78.26 (    +5.10%)
Alloc stall                                 338.06 (    +0.00%)     440.72 (   +30.28%)
Pages kswapd scanned                    1356339.42 (    +0.00%) 1402313.42 (    +3.39%)
Pages kswapd reclaimed                   581309.08 (    +0.00%)  587956.82 (    +1.14%)
Pages direct scanned                      56384.18 (    +0.00%)  141095.04 (  +150.24%)
Pages direct reclaimed                    17055.54 (    +0.00%)   22427.96 (   +31.50%)
Pages scanned kswapd %                       96.38 (    +0.00%)      93.60 (    -2.86%)
Swap out                                  41528.00 (    +0.00%)   47969.92 (   +15.51%)
Swap in                                    6541.42 (    +0.00%)    9093.30 (   +39.01%)
File refaults                            127666.50 (    +0.00%)  135766.84 (    +6.34%)

The series is based on v6.5-rc7.

 include/linux/mm.h             |  18 +-
 include/linux/page-isolation.h |   2 +-
 include/linux/vmstat.h         |   8 -
 mm/debug_page_alloc.c          |  12 +-
 mm/internal.h                  |   5 -
 mm/page_alloc.c                | 382 +++++++++++++++++++++------------------
 mm/page_isolation.c            |  23 ++-
 7 files changed, 230 insertions(+), 220 deletions(-)

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230418191313.268131-1-hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx/