On Wed, 28 Dec 2016, Michal Hocko wrote: > I do care more about _users_ and their _experience_ than what > application _writers_ think is the best. This is the whole point > of giving the defrag tunable. madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) is just a hint to > the system that using transparent hugepages is _preferable_, not > mandatory. We have an option to allow stalls for those vmas to increase > the allocation success rate. We also have tunable to completely ignore > it. And we should also have an option to not stall. >
The application developer who uses madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) is doing so for a reason. We lack the ability to defragment in the background for all users who don't want to block while allowing madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) users to block, as the changelog for this patch clearly indicates. Thanks.
