kernel.git/include/linux/mmzone.h, branch linux-2.6.21.y

[PATCH] optional ZONE_DMA: optional ZONE_DMA in the VM

2007-02-11T18:51:18Z

Make ZONE_DMA optional in core code. - ifdef all code for ZONE_DMA and related definitions following the example for ZONE_DMA32 and ZONE_HIGHMEM. - Without ZONE_DMA, ZONE_HIGHMEM and ZONE_DMA32 we get to a ZONES_SHIFT of 0. - Modify the VM statistics to work correctly without a DMA zone. - Modify slab to not create DMA slabs if there is no ZONE_DMA. [akpm@osdl.org: cleanup] [jdike@addtoit.com: build fix] [apw@shadowen.org: Simplify calculation of the number of bits we need for ZONES_SHIFT] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Cc: Andi Kleen Cc: "Luck, Tony" Cc: Kyle McMartin Cc: Matthew Wilcox Cc: James Bottomley Cc: Paul Mundt Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft Signed-off-by: Jeff Dike Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Drop __get_zone_counts()

2007-02-11T18:51:18Z

Values are readily available via ZVC per node and global sums. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Reorder ZVCs according to cacheline

2007-02-11T18:51:17Z

The global and per zone counter sums are in arrays of longs. Reorder the ZVCs so that the most frequently used ZVCs are put into the same cacheline. That way calculations of the global, node and per zone vm state touches only a single cacheline. This is mostly important for 64 bit systems were one 128 byte cacheline takes only 8 longs. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Use ZVC for free_pages

2007-02-11T18:51:17Z

This is again simplifies some of the VM counter calculations through the use of the ZVC consolidated counters. [michal.k.k.piotrowski@gmail.com: build fix] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Michal Piotrowski Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Use ZVC for inactive and active counts

2007-02-11T18:51:17Z

The determination of the dirty ratio to determine writeback behavior is currently based on the number of total pages on the system. However, not all pages in the system may be dirtied. Thus the ratio is always too low and can never reach 100%. The ratio may be particularly skewed if large hugepage allocations, slab allocations or device driver buffers make large sections of memory not available anymore. In that case we may get into a situation in which f.e. the background writeback ratio of 40% cannot be reached anymore which leads to undesired writeback behavior. This patchset fixes that issue by determining the ratio based on the actual pages that may potentially be dirty. These are the pages on the active and the inactive list plus free pages. The problem with those counts has so far been that it is expensive to calculate these because counts from multiple nodes and multiple zones will have to be summed up. This patchset makes these counters ZVC counters. This means that a current sum per zone, per node and for the whole system is always available via global variables and not expensive anymore to calculate. The patchset results in some other good side effects: - Removal of the various functions that sum up free, active and inactive page counts - Cleanup of the functions that display information via the proc filesystem. This patch: The use of a ZVC for nr_inactive and nr_active allows a simplification of some counter operations. More ZVC functionality is used for sums etc in the following patches. [akpm@osdl.org: UP build fix] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Fix sparsemem on Cell

2007-01-12T02:18:20Z

Fix an oops experienced on the Cell architecture when init-time functions, early_*(), are called at runtime. It alters the call paths to make sure that the callers explicitly say whether the call is being made on behalf of a hotplug even, or happening at boot-time. It has been compile tested on ppc64, ia64, s390, i386 and x86_64. Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen Cc: Yasunori Goto Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Martin Schwidefsky Acked-by: Heiko Carstens Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: Paul Mackerras Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] struct seq_operations and struct file_operations constification

2006-12-07T16:39:46Z

- move some file_operations structs into the .rodata section - move static strings from policy_types[] array into the .rodata section - fix generic seq_operations usages, so that those structs may be defined as "const" as well [akpm@osdl.org: couple of fixes] Signed-off-by: Helge Deller Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] memory page_alloc zonelist caching reorder structure

2006-12-07T16:39:20Z

Rearrange the struct members in the 'struct zonelist_cache' structure, so as to put the readonly (once initialized) z_to_n[] array first, where it will come right after the zones[] array in struct zonelist. This pretty much eliminates the chance that the two frequently written elements of 'struct zonelist_cache', the fullzones bitmap and last_full_zap times, will end up on the same cache line as the performance sensitive, frequently read, never (after init) written zones[] array. Keeping frequently written data off frequently read cache lines is good for performance. Thanks to Rohit Seth for the suggestion. Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson Cc: Rohit Seth Cc: Paul Menage Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup

2006-12-07T16:39:20Z

Optimize the critical zonelist scanning for free pages in the kernel memory allocator by caching the zones that were found to be full recently, and skipping them. Remembers the zones in a zonelist that were short of free memory in the last second. And it stashes a zone-to-node table in the zonelist struct, to optimize that conversion (minimize its cache footprint.) Recent changes: This differs in a significant way from a similar patch that I posted a week ago. Now, instead of having a nodemask_t of recently full nodes, I have a bitmask of recently full zones. This solves a problem that last weeks patch had, which on systems with multiple zones per node (such as DMA zone) would take seeing any of these zones full as meaning that all zones on that node were full. Also I changed names - from "zonelist faster" to "zonelist cache", as that seemed to better convey what we're doing here - caching some of the key zonelist state (for faster access.) See below for some performance benchmark results. After all that discussion with David on why I didn't need them, I went and got some ;). I wanted to verify that I had not hurt the normal case of memory allocation noticeably. At least for my one little microbenchmark, I found (1) the normal case wasn't affected, and (2) workloads that forced scanning across multiple nodes for memory improved up to 10% fewer System CPU cycles and lower elapsed clock time ('sys' and 'real'). Good. See details, below. I didn't have the logic in get_page_from_freelist() for various full nodes and zone reclaim failures correct. That should be fixed up now - notice the new goto labels zonelist_scan, this_zone_full, and try_next_zone, in get_page_from_freelist(). There are two reasons I persued this alternative, over some earlier proposals that would have focused on optimizing the fake numa emulation case by caching the last useful zone: 1) Contrary to what I said before, we (SGI, on large ia64 sn2 systems) have seen real customer loads where the cost to scan the zonelist was a problem, due to many nodes being full of memory before we got to a node we could use. Or at least, I think we have. This was related to me by another engineer, based on experiences from some time past. So this is not guaranteed. Most likely, though. The following approach should help such real numa systems just as much as it helps fake numa systems, or any combination thereof. 2) The effort to distinguish fake from real numa, using node_distance, so that we could cache a fake numa node and optimize choosing it over equivalent distance fake nodes, while continuing to properly scan all real nodes in distance order, was going to require a nasty blob of zonelist and node distance munging. The following approach has no new dependency on node distances or zone sorting. See comment in the patch below for a description of what it actually does. Technical details of note (or controversy): - See the use of "zlc_active" and "did_zlc_setup" below, to delay adding any work for this new mechanism until we've looked at the first zone in zonelist. I figured the odds of the first zone having the memory we needed were high enough that we should just look there, first, then get fancy only if we need to keep looking. - Some odd hackery was needed to add items to struct zonelist, while not tripping up the custom zonelists built by the mm/mempolicy.c code for MPOL_BIND. My usual wordy comments below explain this. Search for "MPOL_BIND". - Some per-node data in the struct zonelist is now modified frequently, with no locking. Multiple CPU cores on a node could hit and mangle this data. The theory is that this is just performance hint data, and the memory allocator will work just fine despite any such mangling. The fields at risk are the struct 'zonelist_cache' fields 'fullzones' (a bitmask) and 'last_full_zap' (unsigned long jiffies). It should all be self correcting after at most a one second delay. - This still does a linear scan of the same lengths as before. All I've optimized is making the scan faster, not algorithmically shorter. It is now able to scan a compact array of 'unsigned short' in the case of many full nodes, so one cache line should cover quite a few nodes, rather than each node hitting another one or two new and distinct cache lines. - If both Andi and Nick don't find this too complicated, I will be (pleasantly) flabbergasted. - I removed the comment claiming we only use one cachline's worth of zonelist. We seem, at least in the fake numa case, to have put the lie to that claim. - I pay no attention to the various watermarks and such in this performance hint. A node could be marked full for one watermark, and then skipped over when searching for a page using a different watermark. I think that's actually quite ok, as it will tend to slightly increase the spreading of memory over other nodes, away from a memory stressed node. =============== Performance - some benchmark results and analysis: This benchmark runs a memory hog program that uses multiple threads to touch alot of memory as quickly as it can. Multiple runs were made, touching 12, 38, 64 or 90 GBytes out of the total 96 GBytes on the system, and using 1, 19, 37, or 55 threads (on a 56 CPU system.) System, user and real (elapsed) timings were recorded for each run, shown in units of seconds, in the table below. Two kernels were tested - 2.6.18-mm3 and the same kernel with this zonelist caching patch added. The table also shows the percentage improvement the zonelist caching sys time is over (lower than) the stock *-mm kernel. number 2.6.18-mm3 zonelist-cache delta (< 0 good) percent GBs N ------------ -------------- ---------------- systime mem threads sys user real sys user real sys user real better 12 1 153 24 177 151 24 176 -2 0 -1 1% 12 19 99 22 8 99 22 8 0 0 0 0% 12 37 111 25 6 112 25 6 1 0 0 -0% 12 55 115 25 5 110 23 5 -5 -2 0 4% 38 1 502 74 576 497 73 570 -5 -1 -6 0% 38 19 426 78 48 373 76 39 -53 -2 -9 12% 38 37 544 83 36 547 82 36 3 -1 0 -0% 38 55 501 77 23 511 80 24 10 3 1 -1% 64 1 917 125 1042 890 124 1014 -27 -1 -28 2% 64 19 1118 138 119 965 141 103 -153 3 -16 13% 64 37 1202 151 94 1136 150 81 -66 -1 -13 5% 64 55 1118 141 61 1072 140 58 -46 -1 -3 4% 90 1 1342 177 1519 1275 174 1450 -67 -3 -69 4% 90 19 2392 199 192 2116 189 176 -276 -10 -16 11% 90 37 3313 238 175 2972 225 145 -341 -13 -30 10% 90 55 1948 210 104 1843 213 100 -105 3 -4 5% Notes: 1) This test ran a memory hog program that started a specified number N of threads, and had each thread allocate and touch 1/N'th of the total memory to be used in the test run in a single loop, writing a constant word to memory, one store every 4096 bytes. Watching this test during some earlier trial runs, I would see each of these threads sit down on one CPU and stay there, for the remainder of the pass, a different CPU for each thread. 2) The 'real' column is not comparable to the 'sys' or 'user' columns. The 'real' column is seconds wall clock time elapsed, from beginning to end of that test pass. The 'sys' and 'user' columns are total CPU seconds spent on that test pass. For a 19 thread test run, for example, the sum of 'sys' and 'user' could be up to 19 times the number of 'real' elapsed wall clock seconds. 3) Tests were run on a fresh, single-user boot, to minimize the amount of memory already in use at the start of the test, and to minimize the amount of background activity that might interfere. 4) Tests were done on a 56 CPU, 28 Node system with 96 GBytes of RAM. 5) Notice that the 'real' time gets large for the single thread runs, even though the measured 'sys' and 'user' times are modest. I'm not sure what that means - probably something to do with it being slow for one thread to be accessing memory along ways away. Perhaps the fake numa system, running ostensibly the same workload, would not show this substantial degradation of 'real' time for one thread on many nodes -- lets hope not. 6) The high thread count passes (one thread per CPU - on 55 of 56 CPUs) ran quite efficiently, as one might expect. Each pair of threads needed to allocate and touch the memory on the node the two threads shared, a pleasantly parallizable workload. 7) The intermediate thread count passes, when asking for alot of memory forcing them to go to a few neighboring nodes, improved the most with this zonelist caching patch. Conclusions: * This zonelist cache patch probably makes little difference one way or the other for most workloads on real numa hardware, if those workloads avoid heavy off node allocations. * For memory intensive workloads requiring substantial off-node allocations on real numa hardware, this patch improves both kernel and elapsed timings up to ten per-cent. * For fake numa systems, I'm optimistic, but will have to leave that up to Rohit Seth to actually test (once I get him a 2.6.18 backport.) Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson Cc: Rohit Seth Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: David Rientjes Cc: Paul Menage Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] vmscan: Fix temp_priority race

2006-10-28T18:30:50Z

The temp_priority field in zone is racy, as we can walk through a reclaim path, and just before we copy it into prev_priority, it can be overwritten (say with DEF_PRIORITY) by another reclaimer. The same bug is contained in both try_to_free_pages and balance_pgdat, but it is fixed slightly differently. In balance_pgdat, we keep a separate priority record per zone in a local array. In try_to_free_pages there is no need to do this, as the priority level is the same for all zones that we reclaim from. Impact of this bug is that temp_priority is copied into prev_priority, and setting this artificially high causes reclaimers to set distress artificially low. They then fail to reclaim mapped pages, when they are, in fact, under severe memory pressure (their priority may be as low as 0). This causes the OOM killer to fire incorrectly. From: Andrew Morton __zone_reclaim() isn't modifying zone->prev_priority. But zone->prev_priority is used in the decision whether or not to bring mapped pages onto the inactive list. Hence there's a risk here that __zone_reclaim() will fail because zone->prev_priority ir large (ie: low urgency) and lots of mapped pages end up stuck on the active list. Fix that up by decreasing (ie making more urgent) zone->prev_priority as __zone_reclaim() scans the zone's pages. This bug perhaps explains why ZONE_RECLAIM_PRIORITY was created. It should be possible to remove that now, and to just start out at DEF_PRIORITY? Cc: Nick Piggin Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds