ZEN: INTERACTIVE: mm: Lower the non-hugetlbpage pageblock size to reduce scheduling delays

The page allocator processes free pages in groups of pageblocks, where
the size of a pageblock is typically quite large (1024 pages without
hugetlbpage support). Pageblocks are processed atomically with the zone
lock held, which can cause severe scheduling delays on both the CPU
going through the pageblock and any other CPUs waiting to acquire the
zone lock. A frequent offender is move_freepages_block(), which is used
by rmqueue() for page allocation.

As it turns out, there's no requirement for pageblocks to be so large,
so the pageblock order can simply be reduced to ease the scheduling
delays and zone lock contention. PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER is used as a
reasonable setting to ensure non-costly page allocation requests can
still be serviced without always needing to free up more than one
pageblock's worth of pages at a time.

This has a noticeable effect on overall system latency when memory
pressure is elevated. The various mm functions which operate on
pageblocks no longer appear in the preemptoff tracer, where previously
they would spend up to 100 ms on a mobile arm64 CPU processing a
pageblock with preemption disabled and the zone lock held.

Signed-off-by: Sultan Alsawaf <[email protected]>

Author: kerneltoast

include/linux/pageblock-flags.h

@@ -52,7 +52,11 @@ extern unsigned int pageblock_order;
 #else /* CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE */
 
 /* If huge pages are not used, group by MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES */
+#ifdef CONFIG_ZEN_INTERACTIVE
+#define pageblock_order		PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER
+#else
 #define pageblock_order		MAX_PAGE_ORDER
+#endif
 
 #endif /* CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE */
 

init/Kconfig

@@ -162,6 +162,7 @@ config ZEN_INTERACTIVE
 	    MG-LRU minimum cache TTL.......:   0    ->   1000 ms
 	    Compact unevictable............:   yes  ->   no
 	    Watermark boost factor.........:   1.5  ->   0
+	    Pageblock order................:  10    ->   3
 
 	  --- EEVDF CPU Scheduler --------------------------------