From: Andrea Arcangeli Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 23:30:38 +0000 (-0700) Subject: mm: compaction: prevent kswapd compacting memory to reduce CPU usage X-Git-Tag: v2.6.39-rc1~356 X-Git-Url: http://git.openpandora.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=d527caf22e48480b102c7c6ee5b9ba12170148f7;p=pandora-kernel.git mm: compaction: prevent kswapd compacting memory to reduce CPU usage This patch reverts 5a03b051 ("thp: use compaction in kswapd for GFP_ATOMIC order > 0") due to reports stating that kswapd CPU usage was higher and IRQs were being disabled more frequently. This was reported at http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/alsa-user/msg09885.html. Without this patch applied, CPU usage by kswapd hovers around the 20% mark according to the tester (Arthur Marsh: http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/alsa-user/msg09899.html). With this patch applied, it's around 2%. The problem is not related to THP which specifies __GFP_NO_KSWAPD but is triggered by high-order allocations hitting the low watermark for their order and waking kswapd on kernels with CONFIG_COMPACTION set. The most common trigger for this is network cards configured for jumbo frames but it's also possible it'll be triggered by fork-heavy workloads (order-1) and some wireless cards which depend on order-1 allocations. The symptoms for the user will be high CPU usage by kswapd in low-memory situations which could be confused with another writeback problem. While a patch like 5a03b051 may be reintroduced in the future, this patch plays it safe for now and reverts it. [mel@csn.ul.ie: Beefed up the changelog] Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Reported-by: Arthur Marsh Tested-by: Arthur Marsh Cc: [2.6.38.1] Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Reading git-diff-tree failed