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mm: clarify COMPACTION Kconfig text
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The current wording of the COMPACTION Kconfig help text doesn't
emphasise that disabling COMPACTION might cripple the page allocator
which relies on the compaction quite heavily for high order requests and
an unexpected OOM can happen with the lack of compaction.  Make sure we
are vocal about that.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160823091726.GK23577@dhcp22.suse.cz
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Markus Trippelsdorf <markus@trippelsdorf.de>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <js1304@gmail.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Michal Hocko authored and Linus Torvalds committed Aug 27, 2016
1 parent a5ff1b3 commit b32eaf7
Showing 1 changed file with 8 additions and 1 deletion.
9 changes: 8 additions & 1 deletion mm/Kconfig
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -262,7 +262,14 @@ config COMPACTION
select MIGRATION
depends on MMU
help
Allows the compaction of memory for the allocation of huge pages.
Compaction is the only memory management component to form
high order (larger physically contiguous) memory blocks
reliably. The page allocator relies on compaction heavily and
the lack of the feature can lead to unexpected OOM killer
invocations for high order memory requests. You shouldn't
disable this option unless there really is a strong reason for
it and then we would be really interested to hear about that at
linux-mm@kvack.org.

#
# support for page migration
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