The standard buddy allocator always favours the smallest block of pages.
The effect of this is that the pages free to satisfy min_free_kbytes tends
to be preserved since boot time at the same location of memory ffor a very
long time and as a contiguous block.  When an administrator sets the
reserve at 16384 at boot time, it tends to be the same MAX_ORDER blocks
that remain free.  This allows the occasional high atomic allocation to
succeed up until the point the blocks are split.  In practice, it is
difficult to split these blocks but when they do split, the benefit of
having min_free_kbytes for contiguous blocks disappears.  Additionally,
increasing min_free_kbytes once the system has been running for some time
has no guarantee of creating contiguous blocks.

On the other hand, CONFIG_PAGE_GROUP_BY_MOBILITY favours splitting large
blocks when there are no free pages of the appropriate type available.  A
side-effect of this is that all blocks in memory tends to be used up and
the contiguous free blocks from boot time are not preserved like in the
vanilla allocator.  This can cause a problem if a new caller is unwilling
to reclaim or does not reclaim for long enough.

A failure scenario was found for a wireless network device allocating
order-1 atomic allocations but the allocations were not intense or frequent
enough for a whole block of pages to be preserved for MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC.
This was reproduced on a desktop by booting with mem=256mb, forcing the
driver to allocate at order-1, running a bittorrent client (downloading a
debian ISO) and building a kernel with -j2.

This patch addresses the problem on the desktop machine booted with
mem=256mb.  It works by setting aside a reserve of MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES
blocks, the number of which depends on the value of min_free_kbytes.  These
blocks are only fallen back to when there is no other free pages.  Then the
smallest possible page is used just like the normal buddy allocator instead
of the largest possible page to preserve contiguous pages The pages in free
lists in the reserve blocks are never taken for another migrate type.  The
results is that even if min_free_kbytes is set to a low value, contiguous
blocks will be preserved in the MIGRATE_RESERVE blocks.

This works better than the vanilla allocator because if min_free_kbytes is
increased, a new reserve block will be chosen based on the location of
reclaimable pages and the block will free up as contiguous pages.  In the
vanilla allocator, no effort is made to target a block of pages to free as
contiguous pages and min_free_kbytes pages are scattered randomly.

This effect has been observed on the test machine.  min_free_kbytes was set
initially low but it was kept as a contiguous free block within
MIGRATE_RESERVE.  min_free_kbytes was then set to a higher value and over a
period of time, the free blocks were within the reserve and coalescing.
How long it takes to free up depends on how quickly LRU is rotating.
Amusingly, this means that more activity will free the blocks faster.

This mechanism potentially replaces MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC as it may be more
effective than grouping contiguous free pages together.  It all depends on
whether the number of active atomic high allocations exceeds
min_free_kbytes or not.  If the number of active allocations exceeds
min_free_kbytes, it's worth it but maybe in that situation, min_free_kbytes
should be set higher.  Once there are no more reports of allocation
failures, a patch will be submitted that backs out MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC and
see if the reports stay missing.

Credit to Mariusz Kozlowski for discovering the problem, describing the
failure scenario and testing patches and scenarios.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>