mm, page_alloc: rip out ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE

Patch series "cleanup zonelists initialization", v1.

This is aimed at cleaning up the zonelists initialization code we have
but the primary motivation was bug report [2] which got resolved but the
usage of stop_machine is just too ugly to live.  Most patches are
straightforward but 3 of them need a special consideration.

Patch 1 removes zone ordered zonelists completely.  I am CCing linux-api
because this is a user visible change.  As I argue in the patch
description I do not think we have a strong usecase for it these days.
I have kept sysctl in place and warn into the log if somebody tries to
configure zone lists ordering.  If somebody has a real usecase for it we
can revert this patch but I do not expect anybody will actually notice
runtime differences.  This patch is not strictly needed for the rest but
it made patch 6 easier to implement.

Patch 7 removes stop_machine from build_all_zonelists without adding any
special synchronization between iterators and updater which I _believe_
is acceptable as explained in the changelog.  I hope I am not missing
anything.

Patch 8 then removes zonelists_mutex which is kind of ugly as well and
not really needed AFAICS but a care should be taken when double checking
my thinking.

This patch (of 9):

Supporting zone ordered zonelists costs us just a lot of code while the
usefulness is arguable if existent at all.  Mel has already made node
ordering default on 64b systems.  32b systems are still using
ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE because it is considered better to fallback to a
different NUMA node rather than consume precious lowmem zones.

This argument is, however, weaken by the fact that the memory reclaim
has been reworked to be node rather than zone oriented.  This means that
lowmem requests have to skip over all highmem pages on LRUs already and
so zone ordering doesn't save the reclaim time much.  So the only
advantage of the zone ordering is under a light memory pressure when
highmem requests do not ever hit into lowmem zones and the lowmem
pressure doesn't need to reclaim.

Considering that 32b NUMA systems are rather suboptimal already and it
is generally advisable to use 64b kernel on such a HW I believe we
should rather care about the code maintainability and just get rid of
ZONELIST_ORDER_ZONE altogether.  Keep systcl in place and warn if
somebody tries to set zone ordering either from kernel command line or
the sysctl.

[mhocko@suse.com: reading vm.numa_zonelist_order will never terminate]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170721143915.14161-2-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <js1304@gmail.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
Cc: Toshi Kani <toshi.kani@hpe.com>
Cc: Abdul Haleem <abdhalee@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/numa b/Documentation/vm/numa
index a08f71647714..a31b85b9bb88 100644
--- a/Documentation/vm/numa
+++ b/Documentation/vm/numa
@@ -79,11 +79,8 @@ memory, Linux must decide whether to order the zonelists such that allocations
 fall back to the same zone type on a different node, or to a different zone
 type on the same node.  This is an important consideration because some zones,
 such as DMA or DMA32, represent relatively scarce resources.  Linux chooses
-a default zonelist order based on the sizes of the various zone types relative
-to the total memory of the node and the total memory of the system.  The
-default zonelist order may be overridden using the numa_zonelist_order kernel
-boot parameter or sysctl.  [see Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.rst and
-Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt]
+a default Node ordered zonelist. This means it tries to fallback to other zones
+from the same node before using remote nodes which are ordered by NUMA distance.
 
 By default, Linux will attempt to satisfy memory allocation requests from the
 node to which the CPU that executes the request is assigned.  Specifically,