page allocator: explicitly retry hugepage allocations

page allocator: explicitly retry hugepage allocations

Add __GFP_REPEAT to hugepage allocations.  Do so to not necessitate userspace
putting pressure on the VM by repeated echo's into /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages
to grow the pool.  With the previous patch to allow for large-order
__GFP_REPEAT attempts to loop for a bit (as opposed to indefinitely), this
increases the likelihood of getting hugepages when the system experiences (or
recently experienced) load.

Mel tested the patchset on an x86_32 laptop.  With the patches, it was easier
to use the proc interface to grow the hugepage pool.  The following is the
output of a script that grows the pool as much as possible running on
2.6.25-rc9.

Allocating hugepages test
-------------------------
Disabling OOM Killer for current test process
Starting page count: 0
Attempt 1: 57 pages Progress made with 57 pages
Attempt 2: 73 pages Progress made with 16 pages
Attempt 3: 74 pages Progress made with 1 pages
Attempt 4: 75 pages Progress made with 1 pages
Attempt 5: 77 pages Progress made with 2 pages

77 pages was the most it allocated but it took 5 attempts from userspace
to get it. With the 3 patches in this series applied,

Allocating hugepages test
-------------------------
Disabling OOM Killer for current test process
Starting page count: 0
Attempt 1: 75 pages Progress made with 75 pages
Attempt 2: 76 pages Progress made with 1 pages
Attempt 3: 79 pages Progress made with 3 pages

And 79 pages was the most it got. Your patches were able to allocate the
bulk of possible pages on the first attempt.

Signed-off-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Tested-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>