Grouping high-order atomic allocations together was intended to allow
bursty users of atomic allocations to work such as e1000 in situations
where their preallocated buffers were depleted. This did not work in at
least one case with a wireless network adapter needing order-1 allocations
frequently. To resolve that, the free pages used for min_free_kbytes were
moved to separate contiguous blocks with the patch
bias-the-location-of-pages-freed-for-min_free_kbytes-in-the-same-max_order_nr_pages-blocks.
It is felt that keeping the free pages in the same contiguous blocks should
be sufficient for bursty short-lived high-order atomic allocations to
succeed, maybe even with the e1000. Even if there is a failure, increasing
the value of min_free_kbytes will free pages as contiguous bloks in
contrast to the standard buddy allocator which makes no attempt to keep the
minimum number of free pages contiguous.
This patch backs out grouping high order atomic allocations together to
determine if it is really needed or not. If a new report comes in about
high-order atomic allocations failing, the feature can be reintroduced to
determine if it fixes the problem or not. As a side-effect, this patch
reduces by 1 the number of bits required to track the mobility type of
pages within a MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES block.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
64c5e135bf