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The fragmentation index may indicate that a failure is due to external
fragmentation but after a compaction run completes, it is still possible
for an allocation to fail.  There are two obvious reasons as to why

  o Page migration cannot move all pages so fragmentation remains
  o A suitable page may exist but watermarks are not met

In the event of compaction followed by an allocation failure, this patch
defers further compaction in the zone (1 << compact_defer_shift) times.
If the next compaction attempt also fails, compact_defer_shift is
increased up to a maximum of 6.  If compaction succeeds, the defer
counters are reset again.

The zone that is deferred is the first zone in the zonelist - i.e.  the
preferred zone.  To defer compaction in the other zones, the information
would need to be stored in the zonelist or implemented similar to the
zonelist_cache.  This would impact the fast-paths and is not justified at
this ...