Jan Stancek reports manual page migration encountering allocation
failures after some pages when there is still plenty of memory free, and
bisected the problem down to commit 81c0a2bb51 ("mm: page_alloc: fair
zone allocator policy").
The problem is that GFP_THISNODE obeys the zone fairness allocation
batches on one hand, but doesn't reset them and wake kswapd on the other
hand. After a few of those allocations, the batches are exhausted and
the allocations fail.
Fixing this means either having GFP_THISNODE wake up kswapd, or
GFP_THISNODE not participating in zone fairness at all. The latter
seems safer as an acute bugfix, we can clean up later.
Reported-by: Jan Stancek <jstancek@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [3.12+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>