mm: limit boost_watermark on small zones
Commit 1c30844d ("mm: reclaim small amounts of memory when an external fragmentation event occurs") adds a boost_watermark() function which increases the min watermark in a zone by at least pageblock_nr_pages or the number of pages in a page block. On Arm64, with 64K pages and 512M huge pages, this is 8192 pages or 512M. It does this regardless of the number of managed pages managed in the zone or the likelihood of success. This can put the zone immediately under water in terms of allocating pages from the zone, and can cause a small machine to fail immediately due to OoM. Unlike set_recommended_min_free_kbytes(), which substantially increases min_free_kbytes and is tied to THP, boost_watermark() can be called even if THP is not active. The problem is most likely to appear on architectures such as Arm64 where pageblock_nr_pages is very large. It is desirable to run the kdump capture kernel in as small a space as possible to avoid wasting memory. In some ...
Please register or sign in to comment