GitLab

Most pagecache (and some other) radix tree insertions have the great
opportunity to preallocate a few nodes with relaxed gfp flags.  But the
preallocation is squandered when it comes time to allocate a node, we
default to first attempting a GFP_ATOMIC allocation -- that doesn't
normally fail, but it can eat into atomic memory reserves that we don't
need to be using.

Another upshot of this is that it removes the sometimes highly contended
zone->lock from underneath tree_lock.  Pagecache insertions are always
performed with a radix tree preload, and after this change, such a
situation will never fall back to kmem_cache_alloc within
radix_tree_node_alloc.

David Miller reports seeing this allocation fail on a highly threaded
sparc64 system:

[527319.459981] dd: page allocation failure. order:0, mode:0x20
[527319.460403] Call Trace:
[527319.460568]  [00000000004b71e0] __slab_alloc+0x1b0/0x6a8
[527319.460636]  [00000000004b7bbc] kmem_cache_alloc+0x...