mm: disable zone_reclaim_mode by default

When it was introduced, zone_reclaim_mode made sense as NUMA distances
punished and workloads were generally partitioned to fit into a NUMA
node.  NUMA machines are now common but few of the workloads are
NUMA-aware and it's routine to see major performance degradation due to
zone_reclaim_mode being enabled but relatively few can identify the
problem.

Those that require zone_reclaim_mode are likely to be able to detect
when it needs to be enabled and tune appropriately so lets have a
sensible default for the bulk of users.

This patch (of 2):

zone_reclaim_mode causes processes to prefer reclaiming memory from
local node instead of spilling over to other nodes.  This made sense
initially when NUMA machines were almost exclusively HPC and the
workload was partitioned into nodes.  The NUMA penalties were
sufficiently high to justify reclaiming the memory.  On current machines
and workloads it is often the case that zone_reclaim_mode destroys
performance but not all users know how to detect this.  Favour the
common case and disable it by default.  Users that are sophisticated
enough to know they need zone_reclaim_mode will detect it.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Zhang Yanfei <zhangyanfei@cn.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/topology.h b/include/linux/topology.h
index 973671ff9e7d..dda6ee521e74 100644
--- a/include/linux/topology.h
+++ b/include/linux/topology.h
@@ -58,7 +58,8 @@ int arch_update_cpu_topology(void);
 /*
  * If the distance between nodes in a system is larger than RECLAIM_DISTANCE
  * (in whatever arch specific measurement units returned by node_distance())
- * then switch on zone reclaim on boot.
+ * and zone_reclaim_mode is enabled then the VM will only call zone_reclaim()
+ * on nodes within this distance.
  */
 #define RECLAIM_DISTANCE 30
 #endif