linux 内存管理(6) - 页面迁移

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1.概述

  A longtime aspect of the kernel’s memory-management subsystem is that it tends to fragment memory over time. After a system has been running for a while, finding groups of physically contiguous pages can be difficult; that is why kernel code will often go to great lengths to avoid the need for contiguous blocks of pages. But there are times when larger blocks are needed; among other things, the transparent huge pages feature requires them. Memory can be defragmented on the fly with the kernel’s memory-compaction mechanism, but compaction is easily thwarted by kernel-allocated pages that cannot be moved out of the way.

  User-space pages are easily migrated; they are accessed via the page tables, so relocating a page is just a matter of changing the appropriate page-table entries. Pages in the system’s page cache are also accessed via a lookup, so they can be migrated as well. Pages allocated by a random kernel subsystem or driver, though, are not so easy to move. They are accessed directly using kernel-space pointers and cannot be moved without changing all of those pointers. Because kernel pages are so hard to move, the memory-management subsystem tries to separate them from pages that can be moved, but that separation can be hard to maintain, especially when memory is in short supply in general. A single unmovable page can foil compaction for a large block of memory.

  Solving this problem in any given subsystem will require getting that subsystem’s cooperation in the compaction process; that is just what Gioh Kim’s driver-page migration patch series sets out to do. It builds on some special-case code (introduced in 2012) that makes balloon-driver pages movable; the patches generalize that code so that it may be used in other subsystems as well.

refer to

• https://lwn.net/Articles/650917/
• https://www.jeanleo.com/2018/09/06/%e3%80%90linux%e5%86%85%e5%ad%98%e6%ba%90%e7%a0%81%e5%88%86%e6%9e%90%e3%80%91%e9%a1%b5%e9%9d%a2%e8%bf%81%e7%a7%bb/