mm, page_isolation: remove bogus tests for isolated pages
authorVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Tue, 8 Sep 2015 22:01:22 +0000 (15:01 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Tue, 8 Sep 2015 22:35:28 +0000 (15:35 -0700)
commitaa016d145d4c3b8a7273429528f19d5b423ddbc7
tree9af9eb30f650e202cdb3fc97a2959ef352fc5940
parent156408c0edaacbea1137f58b28fd6ec341064310
mm, page_isolation: remove bogus tests for isolated pages

The __test_page_isolated_in_pageblock() is used to verify whether all
pages in pageblock were either successfully isolated, or are hwpoisoned.
Two of the possible state of pages, that are tested, are however bogus
and misleading.

Both tests rely on get_freepage_migratetype(page), which however has no
guarantees about pages on freelists.  Specifically, it doesn't guarantee
that the migratetype returned by the function actually matches the
migratetype of the freelist that the page is on.  Such guarantee is not
its purpose and would have negative impact on allocator performance.

The first test checks whether the freepage_migratetype equals
MIGRATE_ISOLATE, supposedly to catch races between page isolation and
allocator activity.  These races should be fixed nowadays with
51bb1a4093 ("mm/page_alloc: add freepage on isolate pageblock to correct
buddy list") and related patches.  As explained above, the check
wouldn't be able to catch them reliably anyway.  For the same reason
false positives can happen, although they are harmless, as the
move_freepages() call would just move the page to the same freelist it's
already on.  So removing the test is not a bug fix, just cleanup.  After
this patch, we assume that all PageBuddy pages are on the correct
freelist and that the races were really fixed.  A truly reliable
verification in the form of e.g.  VM_BUG_ON() would be complicated and
is arguably not needed.

The second test (page_count(page) == 0 && get_freepage_migratetype(page)
== MIGRATE_ISOLATE) is probably supposed (the code comes from a big
memory isolation patch from 2007) to catch pages on MIGRATE_ISOLATE
pcplists.  However, pcplists don't contain MIGRATE_ISOLATE freepages
nowadays, those are freed directly to free lists, so the check is
obsolete.  Remove it as well.

Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Acked-by: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@mina86.com>
Cc: Laura Abbott <lauraa@codeaurora.org>
Reviewed-by: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com>
Cc: Seungho Park <seungho1.park@lge.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
mm/page_alloc.c
mm/page_isolation.c