mm, vmstat: remove zone and node double accounting by approximating retries

The number of LRU pages, dirty pages and writeback pages must be
accounted for on both zones and nodes because of the reclaim retry
logic, compaction retry logic and highmem calculations all depending on
per-zone stats.

Many lowmem allocations are immune from OOM kill due to a check in
__alloc_pages_may_oom for (ac->high_zoneidx < ZONE_NORMAL) since commit
03668b3ceb0c ("oom: avoid oom killer for lowmem allocations").  The
exception is costly high-order allocations or allocations that cannot
fail.  If the __alloc_pages_may_oom avoids OOM-kill for low-order lowmem
allocations then it would fall through to __alloc_pages_direct_compact.

This patch will blindly retry reclaim for zone-constrained allocations
in should_reclaim_retry up to MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES.  This is not ideal
but without per-zone stats there are not many alternatives.  The impact
it that zone-constrained allocations may delay before considering the
OOM killer.

As there is no guarantee enough memory can ever be freed to satisfy
compaction, this patch avoids retrying compaction for zone-contrained
allocations.

In combination, that means that the per-node stats can be used when
deciding whether to continue reclaim using a rough approximation.  While
it is possible this will make the wrong decision on occasion, it will
not infinite loop as the number of reclaim attempts is capped by
MAX_RECLAIM_RETRIES.

The final step is calculating the number of dirtyable highmem pages.  As
those calculations only care about the global count of file pages in
highmem.  This patch uses a global counter used instead of per-zone
stats as it is sufficient.

In combination, this allows the per-zone LRU and dirty state counters to
be removed.

[mgorman@techsingularity.net: fix acct_highmem_file_pages()]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1468853426-12858-4-git-send-email-mgorman@techsingularity.netLink: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1467970510-21195-35-git-send-email-mgorman@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Suggested by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Hillf Danton <hillf.zj@alibaba-inc.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 16 deletions

diff --git a/mm/vmscan.c b/mm/vmscan.c
index d5ee6d998b5e..5625eccc0140 100644
--- a/mm/vmscan.c
+++ b/mm/vmscan.c
@@ -194,22 +194,6 @@ static bool sane_reclaim(struct scan_control *sc)
 }
 #endif
 
-/*
- * This misses isolated pages which are not accounted for to save counters.
- * As the data only determines if reclaim or compaction continues, it is
- * not expected that isolated pages will be a dominating factor.
- */
-unsigned long zone_reclaimable_pages(struct zone *zone)
-{
-	unsigned long nr;
-
-	nr = zone_page_state_snapshot(zone, NR_ZONE_LRU_FILE);
-	if (get_nr_swap_pages() > 0)
-		nr += zone_page_state_snapshot(zone, NR_ZONE_LRU_ANON);
-
-	return nr;
-}
-
 unsigned long pgdat_reclaimable_pages(struct pglist_data *pgdat)
 {
 	unsigned long nr;