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  • Mel Gorman's avatar
    mm: remove __GFP_COLD · 453f85d4
    Mel Gorman authored
    As the page free path makes no distinction between cache hot and cold
    pages, there is no real useful ordering of pages in the free list that
    allocation requests can take advantage of.  Juding from the users of
    __GFP_COLD, it is likely that a number of them are the result of copying
    other sites instead of actually measuring the impact.  Remove the
    __GFP_COLD parameter which simplifies a number of paths in the page
    allocator.
    
    This is potentially controversial but bear in mind that the size of the
    per-cpu pagelists versus modern cache sizes means that the whole per-cpu
    list can often fit in the L3 cache.  Hence, there is only a potential
    benefit for microbenchmarks that alloc/free pages in a tight loop.  It's
    even worse when THP is taken into account which has little or no chance
    of getting a cache-hot page as the per-cpu list is bypassed and the
    zeroing of multiple pages will thrash the cache anyway.
    
    The truncate microbenchmarks are not shown as this patch affects the
    allocation path and not the free path.  A page fault microbenchmark was
    tested but it showed no sigificant difference which is not surprising
    given that the __GFP_COLD branches are a miniscule percentage of the
    fault path.
    
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20171018075952.10627-9-mgorman@techsingularity.net
    
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
    Acked-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
    Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
    Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
    Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
    Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
    Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    453f85d4