The MPOL_BIND policy creates a zonelist that is used for allocations
controlled by that mempolicy. As the per-node zonelist is already being
filtered based on a zone id, this patch adds a version of __alloc_pages() that
takes a nodemask for further filtering. This eliminates the need for
MPOL_BIND to create a custom zonelist.
A positive benefit of this is that allocations using MPOL_BIND now use the
local node's distance-ordered zonelist instead of a custom node-id-ordered
zonelist. I.e., pages will be allocated from the closest allowed node with
available memory.
[Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com: Mempolicy: update stale documentation and comments]
[Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com: Mempolicy: make dequeue_huge_page_vma() obey MPOL_BIND nodemask]
[Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com: Mempolicy: make dequeue_huge_page_vma() obey MPOL_BIND nodemask rework]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Filtering zonelists requires very frequent use of zone_idx(). This is costly
as it involves a lookup of another structure and a substraction operation. As
the zone_idx is often required, it should be quickly accessible. The node idx
could also be stored here if it was found that accessing zone->node is
significant which may be the case on workloads where nodemasks are heavily
used.
This patch introduces a struct zoneref to store a zone pointer and a zone
index. The zonelist then consists of an array of these struct zonerefs which
are looked up as necessary. Helpers are given for accessing the zone index as
well as the node index.
[kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com: Suggested struct zoneref instead of embedding information in pointers]
[hugh@veritas.com: mm-have-zonelist: fix memcg ooms]
[hugh@veritas.com: just return do_try_to_free_pages]
[hugh@veritas.com: do_try_to_free_pages gfp_mask redundant]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Currently a node has two sets of zonelists, one for each zone type in the
system and a second set for GFP_THISNODE allocations. Based on the zones
allowed by a gfp mask, one of these zonelists is selected. All of these
zonelists consume memory and occupy cache lines.
This patch replaces the multiple zonelists per-node with two zonelists. The
first contains all populated zones in the system, ordered by distance, for
fallback allocations when the target/preferred node has no free pages. The
second contains all populated zones in the node suitable for GFP_THISNODE
allocations.
An iterator macro is introduced called for_each_zone_zonelist() that interates
through each zone allowed by the GFP flags in the selected zonelist.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
MAX_NODES_SHIFT is not referenced anywhere in the tree, so dump it.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@saeurebad.de>
Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
We have repeatedly discussed if the cold pages still have a point. There is
one way to join the two lists: Use a single list and put the cold pages at the
end and the hot pages at the beginning. That way a single list can serve for
both types of allocations.
The discussion of the RFC for this and Mel's measurements indicate that
there may not be too much of a point left to having separate lists for
hot and cold pages (see http://marc.info/?t=119492914200001&r=1&w=2).
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Martin Bligh <mbligh@mbligh.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Introduces new zone flag interface for testing and setting flags:
int zone_test_and_set_flag(struct zone *zone, zone_flags_t flag)
Instead of setting and clearing ZONE_RECLAIM_LOCKED each time shrink_zone() is
called, this flag is test and set before starting zone reclaim. Zone reclaim
starts in __alloc_pages() when a zone's watermark fails and the system is in
zone_reclaim_mode. If it's already in reclaim, there's no need to start again
so it is simply considered full for that allocation attempt.
There is a change of behavior with regard to concurrent zone shrinking. It is
now possible for try_to_free_pages() or kswapd to already be shrinking a
particular zone when __alloc_pages() starts zone reclaim. In this case, it is
possible for two concurrent threads to invoke shrink_zone() for a single zone.
This change forbids a zone to be in zone reclaim twice, which was always the
behavior, but allows for concurrent try_to_free_pages() or kswapd shrinking
when starting zone reclaim.
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
OOM killer synchronization should be done with zone granularity so that memory
policy and cpuset allocations may have their corresponding zones locked and
allow parallel kills for other OOM conditions that may exist elsewhere in the
system. DMA allocations can be targeted at the zone level, which would not be
possible if locking was done in nodes or globally.
Synchronization shall be done with a variation of "trylocks." The goal is to
put the current task to sleep and restart the failed allocation attempt later
if the trylock fails. Otherwise, the OOM killer is invoked.
Each zone in the zonelist that __alloc_pages() was called with is checked for
the newly-introduced ZONE_OOM_LOCKED flag. If any zone has this flag present,
the "trylock" to serialize the OOM killer fails and returns zero. Otherwise,
all the zones have ZONE_OOM_LOCKED set and the try_set_zone_oom() function
returns non-zero.
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Convert the int all_unreclaimable member of struct zone to unsigned long
flags. This can now be used to specify several different zone flags such as
all_unreclaimable and reclaim_in_progress, which can now be removed and
converted to a per-zone flag.
Flags are set and cleared as follows:
zone_set_flag(struct zone *zone, zone_flags_t flag)
zone_clear_flag(struct zone *zone, zone_flags_t flag)
Defines the first zone flags, ZONE_ALL_UNRECLAIMABLE and ZONE_RECLAIM_LOCKED,
which have the same semantics as the old zone->all_unreclaimable and
zone->reclaim_in_progress, respectively. Also converts all current users that
set or clear either flag to use the new interface.
Helper functions are defined to test the flags:
int zone_is_all_unreclaimable(const struct zone *zone)
int zone_is_reclaim_locked(const struct zone *zone)
All flag operators are of the atomic variety because there are currently
readers that are implemented that do not take zone->lock.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: add needed include]
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Implement generic chunk-of-pages isolation method by using page grouping ops.
This patch add MIGRATE_ISOLATE to MIGRATE_TYPES. By this
- MIGRATE_TYPES increases.
- bitmap for migratetype is enlarged.
pages of MIGRATE_ISOLATE migratetype will not be allocated even if it is free.
By this, you can isolated *freed* pages from users. How-to-free pages is not
a purpose of this patch. You may use reclaim and migrate codes to free pages.
If start_isolate_page_range(start,end) is called,
- migratetype of the range turns to be MIGRATE_ISOLATE if
its type is MIGRATE_MOVABLE. (*) this check can be updated if other
memory reclaiming works make progress.
- MIGRATE_ISOLATE is not on migratetype fallback list.
- All free pages and will-be-freed pages are isolated.
To check all pages in the range are isolated or not, use test_pages_isolated(),
To cancel isolation, use undo_isolate_page_range().
Changes V6 -> V7
- removed unnecessary #ifdef
There are HOLES_IN_ZONE handling codes...I'm glad if we can remove them..
Signed-off-by: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch provides fragmentation avoidance statistics via /proc/pagetypeinfo.
The information is collected only on request so there is no runtime overhead.
The statistics are in three parts:
The first part prints information on the size of blocks that pages are
being grouped on and looks like
Page block order: 10
Pages per block: 1024
The second part is a more detailed version of /proc/buddyinfo and looks like
Free pages count per migrate type at order 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Node 0, zone DMA, type Unmovable 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Node 0, zone DMA, type Reclaimable 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Node 0, zone DMA, type Movable 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Node 0, zone DMA, type Reserve 0 4 4 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0
Node 0, zone Normal, type Unmovable 111 8 4 4 2 3 1 0 0 0 0
Node 0, zone Normal, type Reclaimable 293 89 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Node 0, zone Normal, type Movable 1 6 13 9 7 6 3 0 0 0 0
Node 0, zone Normal, type Reserve 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4
The third part looks like
Number of blocks type Unmovable Reclaimable Movable Reserve
Node 0, zone DMA 0 1 2 1
Node 0, zone Normal 3 17 94 4
To walk the zones within a node with interrupts disabled, walk_zones_in_node()
is introduced and shared between /proc/buddyinfo, /proc/zoneinfo and
/proc/pagetypeinfo to reduce code duplication. It seems specific to what
vmstat.c requires but could be broken out as a general utility function in
mmzone.c if there were other other potential users.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Currently mobility grouping works at the MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES level. This makes
sense for the majority of users where this is also the huge page size.
However, on platforms like ia64 where the huge page size is runtime
configurable it is desirable to group at a lower order. On x86_64 and
occasionally on x86, the hugepage size may not always be MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES.
This patch groups pages together based on the value of HUGETLB_PAGE_ORDER. It
uses a compile-time constant if possible and a variable where the huge page
size is runtime configurable.
It is assumed that grouping should be done at the lowest sensible order and
that the user would not want to override this. If this is not true,
page_block order could be forced to a variable initialised via a boot-time
kernel parameter.
One potential issue with this patch is that IA64 now parses hugepagesz with
early_param() instead of __setup(). __setup() is called after the memory
allocator has been initialised and the pageblock bitmaps already setup. In
tests on one IA64 there did not seem to be any problem with using
early_param() and in fact may be more correct as it guarantees the parameter
is handled before the parsing of hugepages=.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Grouping high-order atomic allocations together was intended to allow
bursty users of atomic allocations to work such as e1000 in situations
where their preallocated buffers were depleted. This did not work in at
least one case with a wireless network adapter needing order-1 allocations
frequently. To resolve that, the free pages used for min_free_kbytes were
moved to separate contiguous blocks with the patch
bias-the-location-of-pages-freed-for-min_free_kbytes-in-the-same-max_order_nr_pages-blocks.
It is felt that keeping the free pages in the same contiguous blocks should
be sufficient for bursty short-lived high-order atomic allocations to
succeed, maybe even with the e1000. Even if there is a failure, increasing
the value of min_free_kbytes will free pages as contiguous bloks in
contrast to the standard buddy allocator which makes no attempt to keep the
minimum number of free pages contiguous.
This patch backs out grouping high order atomic allocations together to
determine if it is really needed or not. If a new report comes in about
high-order atomic allocations failing, the feature can be reintroduced to
determine if it fixes the problem or not. As a side-effect, this patch
reduces by 1 the number of bits required to track the mobility type of
pages within a MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES block.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Grouping pages by mobility can be disabled at compile-time. This was
considered undesirable by a number of people. However, in the current stack of
patches, it is not a simple case of just dropping the configurable patch as it
would cause merge conflicts. This patch backs out the configuration option.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The standard buddy allocator always favours the smallest block of pages.
The effect of this is that the pages free to satisfy min_free_kbytes tends
to be preserved since boot time at the same location of memory ffor a very
long time and as a contiguous block. When an administrator sets the
reserve at 16384 at boot time, it tends to be the same MAX_ORDER blocks
that remain free. This allows the occasional high atomic allocation to
succeed up until the point the blocks are split. In practice, it is
difficult to split these blocks but when they do split, the benefit of
having min_free_kbytes for contiguous blocks disappears. Additionally,
increasing min_free_kbytes once the system has been running for some time
has no guarantee of creating contiguous blocks.
On the other hand, CONFIG_PAGE_GROUP_BY_MOBILITY favours splitting large
blocks when there are no free pages of the appropriate type available. A
side-effect of this is that all blocks in memory tends to be used up and
the contiguous free blocks from boot time are not preserved like in the
vanilla allocator. This can cause a problem if a new caller is unwilling
to reclaim or does not reclaim for long enough.
A failure scenario was found for a wireless network device allocating
order-1 atomic allocations but the allocations were not intense or frequent
enough for a whole block of pages to be preserved for MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC.
This was reproduced on a desktop by booting with mem=256mb, forcing the
driver to allocate at order-1, running a bittorrent client (downloading a
debian ISO) and building a kernel with -j2.
This patch addresses the problem on the desktop machine booted with
mem=256mb. It works by setting aside a reserve of MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES
blocks, the number of which depends on the value of min_free_kbytes. These
blocks are only fallen back to when there is no other free pages. Then the
smallest possible page is used just like the normal buddy allocator instead
of the largest possible page to preserve contiguous pages The pages in free
lists in the reserve blocks are never taken for another migrate type. The
results is that even if min_free_kbytes is set to a low value, contiguous
blocks will be preserved in the MIGRATE_RESERVE blocks.
This works better than the vanilla allocator because if min_free_kbytes is
increased, a new reserve block will be chosen based on the location of
reclaimable pages and the block will free up as contiguous pages. In the
vanilla allocator, no effort is made to target a block of pages to free as
contiguous pages and min_free_kbytes pages are scattered randomly.
This effect has been observed on the test machine. min_free_kbytes was set
initially low but it was kept as a contiguous free block within
MIGRATE_RESERVE. min_free_kbytes was then set to a higher value and over a
period of time, the free blocks were within the reserve and coalescing.
How long it takes to free up depends on how quickly LRU is rotating.
Amusingly, this means that more activity will free the blocks faster.
This mechanism potentially replaces MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC as it may be more
effective than grouping contiguous free pages together. It all depends on
whether the number of active atomic high allocations exceeds
min_free_kbytes or not. If the number of active allocations exceeds
min_free_kbytes, it's worth it but maybe in that situation, min_free_kbytes
should be set higher. Once there are no more reports of allocation
failures, a patch will be submitted that backs out MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC and
see if the reports stay missing.
Credit to Mariusz Kozlowski for discovering the problem, describing the
failure scenario and testing patches and scenarios.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
There are problems in the use of SPARSEMEM and pageblock flags that causes
problems on ia64.
The first part of the problem is that units are incorrect in
SECTION_BLOCKFLAGS_BITS computation. This results in a map_section's
section_mem_map being treated as part of a bitmap which isn't good. This
was evident with an invalid virtual address when mem_init attempted to free
bootmem pages while relinquishing control from the bootmem allocator.
The second part of the problem occurs because the pageblock flags bitmap is
be located with the mem_section. The SECTIONS_PER_ROOT computation using
sizeof (mem_section) may not be a power of 2 depending on the size of the
bitmap. This renders masks and other such things not power of 2 base.
This issue was seen with SPARSEMEM_EXTREME on ia64. This patch moves the
bitmap outside of mem_section and uses a pointer instead in the
mem_section. The bitmaps are allocated when the section is being
initialised.
Note that sparse_early_usemap_alloc() does not use alloc_remap() like
sparse_early_mem_map_alloc(). The allocation required for the bitmap on
x86, the only architecture that uses alloc_remap is typically smaller than
a cache line. alloc_remap() pads out allocations to the cache size which
would be a needless waste.
Credit to Bob Picco for identifying the original problem and effecting a
fix for the SECTION_BLOCKFLAGS_BITS calculation. Credit to Andy Whitcroft
for devising the best way of allocating the bitmaps only when required for
the section.
[wli@holomorphy.com: warning fix]
Signed-off-by: Bob Picco <bob.picco@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: William Irwin <bill.irwin@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
In rare cases, the kernel needs to allocate a high-order block of pages
without sleeping. For example, this is the case with e1000 cards configured
to use jumbo frames. Migrating or reclaiming pages in this situation is not
an option.
This patch groups these allocations together as much as possible by adding a
new MIGRATE_TYPE. The MIGRATE_HIGHATOMIC type are exactly what they sound
like. Care is taken that pages of other migrate types do not use the same
blocks as high-order atomic allocations.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch marks a number of allocations that are either short-lived such as
network buffers or are reclaimable such as inode allocations. When something
like updatedb is called, long-lived and unmovable kernel allocations tend to
be spread throughout the address space which increases fragmentation.
This patch groups these allocations together as much as possible by adding a
new MIGRATE_TYPE. The MIGRATE_RECLAIMABLE type is for allocations that can be
reclaimed on demand, but not moved. i.e. they can be migrated by deleting
them and re-reading the information from elsewhere.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The grouping mechanism has some memory overhead and a more complex allocation
path. This patch allows the strategy to be disabled for small memory systems
or if it is known the workload is suffering because of the strategy. It also
acts to show where the page groupings strategy interacts with the standard
buddy allocator.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Joel Schopp <jschopp@austin.ibm.com>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch adds the core of the fragmentation reduction strategy. It works by
grouping pages together based on their ability to migrate or be reclaimed.
Basically, it works by breaking the list in zone->free_area list into
MIGRATE_TYPES number of lists.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Here is the latest revision of the anti-fragmentation patches. Of particular
note in this version is special treatment of high-order atomic allocations.
Care is taken to group them together and avoid grouping pages of other types
near them. Artifical tests imply that it works. I'm trying to get the
hardware together that would allow setting up of a "real" test. If anyone
already has a setup and test that can trigger the atomic-allocation problem,
I'd appreciate a test of these patches and a report. The second major change
is that these patches will apply cleanly with patches that implement
anti-fragmentation through zones.
kernbench shows effectively no performance difference varying between -0.2%
and +2% on a variety of test machines. Success rates for huge page allocation
are dramatically increased. For example, on a ppc64 machine, the vanilla
kernel was only able to allocate 1% of memory as a hugepage and this was due
to a single hugepage reserved as min_free_kbytes. With these patches applied,
17% was allocatable as superpages. With reclaim-related fixes from Andy
Whitcroft, it was 40% and further reclaim-related improvements should increase
this further.
Changelog Since V28
o Group high-order atomic allocations together
o It is no longer required to set min_free_kbytes to 10% of memory. A value
of 16384 in most cases will be sufficient
o Now applied with zone-based anti-fragmentation
o Fix incorrect VM_BUG_ON within buffered_rmqueue()
o Reorder the stack so later patches do not back out work from earlier patches
o Fix bug were journal pages were being treated as movable
o Bias placement of non-movable pages to lower PFNs
o More agressive clustering of reclaimable pages in reactions to workloads
like updatedb that flood the size of inode caches
Changelog Since V27
o Renamed anti-fragmentation to Page Clustering. Anti-fragmentation was giving
the mistaken impression that it was the 100% solution for high order
allocations. Instead, it greatly increases the chances high-order
allocations will succeed and lays the foundation for defragmentation and
memory hot-remove to work properly
o Redefine page groupings based on ability to migrate or reclaim instead of
basing on reclaimability alone
o Get rid of spurious inits
o Per-cpu lists are no longer split up per-type. Instead the per-cpu list is
searched for a page of the appropriate type
o Added more explanation commentary
o Fix up bug in pageblock code where bitmap was used before being initalised
Changelog Since V26
o Fix double init of lists in setup_pageset
Changelog Since V25
o Fix loop order of for_each_rclmtype_order so that order of loop matches args
o gfpflags_to_rclmtype uses gfp_t instead of unsigned long
o Rename get_pageblock_type() to get_page_rclmtype()
o Fix alignment problem in move_freepages()
o Add mechanism for assigning flags to blocks of pages instead of page->flags
o On fallback, do not examine the preferred list of free pages a second time
The purpose of these patches is to reduce external fragmentation by grouping
pages of related types together. When pages are migrated (or reclaimed under
memory pressure), large contiguous pages will be freed.
This patch works by categorising allocations by their ability to migrate;
Movable - The pages may be moved with the page migration mechanism. These are
generally userspace pages.
Reclaimable - These are allocations for some kernel caches that are
reclaimable or allocations that are known to be very short-lived.
Unmovable - These are pages that are allocated by the kernel that
are not trivially reclaimed. For example, the memory allocated for a
loaded module would be in this category. By default, allocations are
considered to be of this type
HighAtomic - These are high-order allocations belonging to callers that
cannot sleep or perform any IO. In practice, this is restricted to
jumbo frame allocation for network receive. It is assumed that the
allocations are short-lived
Instead of having one MAX_ORDER-sized array of free lists in struct free_area,
there is one for each type of reclaimability. Once a 2^MAX_ORDER block of
pages is split for a type of allocation, it is added to the free-lists for
that type, in effect reserving it. Hence, over time, pages of the different
types can be clustered together.
When the preferred freelists are expired, the largest possible block is taken
from an alternative list. Buddies that are split from that large block are
placed on the preferred allocation-type freelists to mitigate fragmentation.
This implementation gives best-effort for low fragmentation in all zones.
Ideally, min_free_kbytes needs to be set to a value equal to 4 * (1 <<
(MAX_ORDER-1)) pages in most cases. This would be 16384 on x86 and x86_64 for
example.
Our tests show that about 60-70% of physical memory can be allocated on a
desktop after a few days uptime. In benchmarks and stress tests, we are
finding that 80% of memory is available as contiguous blocks at the end of the
test. To compare, a standard kernel was getting < 1% of memory as large pages
on a desktop and about 8-12% of memory as large pages at the end of stress
tests.
Following this email are 12 patches that implement thie page grouping feature.
The first patch introduces a mechanism for storing flags related to a whole
block of pages. Then allocations are split between movable and all other
allocations. Following that are patches to deal with per-cpu pages and make
the mechanism configurable. The next patch moves free pages between lists
when partially allocated blocks are used for pages of another migrate type.
The second last patch groups reclaimable kernel allocations such as inode
caches together. The final patch related to groupings keeps high-order atomic
allocations.
The last two patches are more concerned with control of fragmentation. The
second last patch biases placement of non-movable allocations towards the
start of memory. This is with a view of supporting memory hot-remove of DIMMs
with higher PFNs in the future. The biasing could be enforced a lot heavier
but it would cost. The last patch agressively clusters reclaimable pages like
inode caches together.
The fragmentation reduction strategy needs to track if pages within a block
can be moved or reclaimed so that pages are freed to the appropriate list.
This patch adds a bitmap for flags affecting a whole a MAX_ORDER block of
pages.
In non-SPARSEMEM configurations, the bitmap is stored in the struct zone and
allocated during initialisation. SPARSEMEM statically allocates the bitmap in
a struct mem_section so that bitmaps do not have to be resized during memory
hotadd. This wastes a small amount of memory per unused section (usually
sizeof(unsigned long)) but the complexity of dynamically allocating the memory
is quite high.
Additional credit to Andy Whitcroft who reviewed up an earlier implementation
of the mechanism an suggested how to make it a *lot* cleaner.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
GFP_THISNODE checks that the zone selected is within the pgdat (node) of the
first zone of a nodelist. That only works if the node has memory. A
memoryless node will have its first node on another pgdat (node).
GFP_THISNODE currently will return simply memory on the first pgdat. Thus it
is returning memory on other nodes. GFP_THISNODE should fail if there is no
local memory on a node.
Add a new set of zonelists for each node that only contain the nodes that
belong to the zones itself so that no fallback is possible.
Then modify gfp_type to pickup the right zone based on the presence of
__GFP_THISNODE.
Drop the existing GFP_THISNODE checks from the page_allocators hot path.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Acked-by: Bob Picco <bob.picco@hp.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@skynet.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
We have flags to indicate whether a section actually has a valid mem_map
associated with it. This is never set and we rely solely on the present bit
to indicate a section is valid. By definition a section is not valid if it
has no mem_map and there is a window during init where the present bit is set
but there is no mem_map, during which pfn_valid() will return true
incorrectly.
Use the existing SECTION_HAS_MEM_MAP flag to indicate the presence of a valid
mem_map. Switch valid_section{,_nr} and pfn_valid() to this bit. Add a new
present_section{,_nr} and pfn_present() interfaces for those users who care to
know that a section is going to be valid.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-syle fixes]
Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The NUMA layer only supports NUMA policies for the highest zone. When
ZONE_MOVABLE is configured with kernelcore=, the the highest zone becomes
ZONE_MOVABLE. The result is that policies are only applied to allocations
like anonymous pages and page cache allocated from ZONE_MOVABLE when the
zone is used.
This patch applies policies to the two highest zones when the highest zone
is ZONE_MOVABLE. As ZONE_MOVABLE consists of pages from the highest "real"
zone, it's always functionally equivalent.
The patch has been tested on a variety of machines both NUMA and non-NUMA
covering x86, x86_64 and ppc64. No abnormal results were seen in
kernbench, tbench, dbench or hackbench. It passes regression tests from
the numactl package with and without kernelcore= once numactl tests are
patched to wait for vmstat counters to update.
akpm: this is the nasty hack to fix NUMA mempolicies in the presence of
ZONE_MOVABLE and kernelcore= in 2.6.23. Christoph says "For .24 either merge
the mobility or get the other solution that Mel is working on. That solution
would only use a single zonelist per node and filter on the fly. That may
help performance and also help to make memory policies work better."
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Tested-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Mel Gorman
Harvey Harrison
Johannes Weiner
Christoph Lameter
David Rientjes
KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Andy Whitcroft
Adrian Bunk