Since THP allocations during page faults can be costly, extra decisions
are employed for them to avoid excessive reclaim and compaction, if the
initial compaction doesn't look promising.  The detection has never been
perfect as there is no gfp flag specific to THP allocations.  At this
moment it checks the whole combination of flags that makes up
GFP_TRANSHUGE, and hopes that no other users of such combination exist,
or would mind being treated the same way.  Extra care is also taken to
separate allocations from khugepaged, where latency doesn't matter that
much.

It is however possible to distinguish these allocations in a simpler and
more reliable way.  The key observation is that after the initial
compaction followed by the first iteration of "standard"
reclaim/compaction, both __GFP_NORETRY allocations and costly
allocations without __GFP_REPEAT are declared as failures:

        /* Do not loop if specifically requested */
        if (gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY)
                goto nopage;

        /*
         * Do not retry costly high order allocations unless they are
         * __GFP_REPEAT
         */
        if (order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER && !(gfp_mask & __GFP_REPEAT))
                goto nopage;

This means we can further distinguish allocations that are costly order
*and* additionally include the __GFP_NORETRY flag.  As it happens,
GFP_TRANSHUGE allocations do already fall into this category.  This will
also allow other costly allocations with similar high-order benefit vs
latency considerations to use this semantic.  Furthermore, we can
distinguish THP allocations that should try a bit harder (such as from
khugepageed) by removing __GFP_NORETRY, as will be done in the next
patch.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160721073614.24395-6-vbabka@suse.czSigned-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>