mm: clarify COMPACTION Kconfig text

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/[email protected] Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]> Cc: Markus Trippelsdorf <[email protected]> Cc: Mel Gorman <[email protected]> Cc: Joonsoo Kim <[email protected]> Cc: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
chewitt · Aug 27, 2016 · b32eaf7 · b32eaf7
1 parent a5ff1b3
commit b32eaf7
Showing 1 changed file with 8 additions and 1 deletion.
diff --git a/mm/Kconfig b/mm/Kconfig
@@ -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
+          [email protected].
 
 #
 # support for page migration