Commit Graph

41 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Mel Gorman 2a1e274acf Create the ZONE_MOVABLE zone
The following 8 patches against 2.6.20-mm2 create a zone called ZONE_MOVABLE
that is only usable by allocations that specify both __GFP_HIGHMEM and
__GFP_MOVABLE.  This has the effect of keeping all non-movable pages within a
single memory partition while allowing movable allocations to be satisfied
from either partition.  The patches may be applied with the list-based
anti-fragmentation patches that groups pages together based on mobility.

The size of the zone is determined by a kernelcore= parameter specified at
boot-time.  This specifies how much memory is usable by non-movable
allocations and the remainder is used for ZONE_MOVABLE.  Any range of pages
within ZONE_MOVABLE can be released by migrating the pages or by reclaiming.

When selecting a zone to take pages from for ZONE_MOVABLE, there are two
things to consider.  First, only memory from the highest populated zone is
used for ZONE_MOVABLE.  On the x86, this is probably going to be ZONE_HIGHMEM
but it would be ZONE_DMA on ppc64 or possibly ZONE_DMA32 on x86_64.  Second,
the amount of memory usable by the kernel will be spread evenly throughout
NUMA nodes where possible.  If the nodes are not of equal size, the amount of
memory usable by the kernel on some nodes may be greater than others.

By default, the zone is not as useful for hugetlb allocations because they are
pinned and non-migratable (currently at least).  A sysctl is provided that
allows huge pages to be allocated from that zone.  This means that the huge
page pool can be resized to the size of ZONE_MOVABLE during the lifetime of
the system assuming that pages are not mlocked.  Despite huge pages being
non-movable, we do not introduce additional external fragmentation of note as
huge pages are always the largest contiguous block we care about.

Credit goes to Andy Whitcroft for catching a large variety of problems during
review of the patches.

This patch creates an additional zone, ZONE_MOVABLE.  This zone is only usable
by allocations which specify both __GFP_HIGHMEM and __GFP_MOVABLE.  Hot-added
memory continues to be placed in their existing destination as there is no
mechanism to redirect them to a specific zone.

[y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com: Fix section mismatch of memory hotplug related code]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: various fixes]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-07-17 10:22:59 -07:00
Peter Zijlstra 23c1fb5296 mm: fixup /proc/vmstat output
Line up the vmstat_text with zone_stat_item

enum zone_stat_item {
	/* First 128 byte cacheline (assuming 64 bit words) */
	NR_FREE_PAGES,
	NR_INACTIVE,
	NR_ACTIVE,

We current have nr_active and nr_inactive reversed.

[ "OK with patch, though using initializers canbe handy to prevent such
   things in future:

	static const char * const vmstat_text[] = {
		[NR_FREE_PAGES] = "nr_free_pages",
		..."
							 - Alexey ]

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-07-06 10:26:50 -07:00
Alexey Dobriyan e8edc6e03a Detach sched.h from mm.h
First thing mm.h does is including sched.h solely for can_do_mlock() inline
function which has "current" dereference inside. By dealing with can_do_mlock()
mm.h can be detached from sched.h which is good. See below, why.

This patch
a) removes unconditional inclusion of sched.h from mm.h
b) makes can_do_mlock() normal function in mm/mlock.c
c) exports can_do_mlock() to not break compilation
d) adds sched.h inclusions back to files that were getting it indirectly.
e) adds less bloated headers to some files (asm/signal.h, jiffies.h) that were
   getting them indirectly

Net result is:
a) mm.h users would get less code to open, read, preprocess, parse, ... if
   they don't need sched.h
b) sched.h stops being dependency for significant number of files:
   on x86_64 allmodconfig touching sched.h results in recompile of 4083 files,
   after patch it's only 3744 (-8.3%).

Cross-compile tested on

	all arm defconfigs, all mips defconfigs, all powerpc defconfigs,
	alpha alpha-up
	arm
	i386 i386-up i386-defconfig i386-allnoconfig
	ia64 ia64-up
	m68k
	mips
	parisc parisc-up
	powerpc powerpc-up
	s390 s390-up
	sparc sparc-up
	sparc64 sparc64-up
	um-x86_64
	x86_64 x86_64-up x86_64-defconfig x86_64-allnoconfig

as well as my two usual configs.

Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-21 09:18:19 -07:00
Christoph Lameter 39bf6270f5 VM statistics: Make timer deferrable
VM statistics updates do not matter if the kernel is in idle powersaving
mode.  So allow the timer to be deferred.

It would be better though if we could switch the timer between deferrable
and nondeferrable based on differentials present.  The timer would start
out nondeferrable and if we find that there were no updates in the last
statistics interval then we would switch the timer to deferrable.  If the
timer later finds again that there are differentials then go to
nondeferrable again.

And yet another way would be to run the timer shortly before going to idle?

The solution here means that the VM counters may be slightly off during
idle since differentials may be still pending while the timer is deferred.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-11 08:29:32 -07:00
Christoph Lameter 4037d45220 Move remote node draining out of slab allocators
Currently the slab allocators contain callbacks into the page allocator to
perform the draining of pagesets on remote nodes.  This requires SLUB to have
a whole subsystem in order to be compatible with SLAB.  Moving node draining
out of the slab allocators avoids a section of code in SLUB.

Move the node draining so that is is done when the vm statistics are updated.
At that point we are already touching all the cachelines with the pagesets of
a processor.

Add a expire counter there.  If we have to update per zone or global vm
statistics then assume that the pageset will require subsequent draining.

The expire counter will be decremented on each vm stats update pass until it
reaches zero.  Then we will drain one batch from the pageset.  The draining
will cause vm counter updates which will then cause another expiration until
the pcp is empty.  So we will drain a batch every 3 seconds.

Note that remote node draining is a somewhat esoteric feature that is required
on large NUMA systems because otherwise significant portions of system memory
can become trapped in pcp queues.  The number of pcp is determined by the
number of processors and nodes in a system.  A system with 4 processors and 2
nodes has 8 pcps which is okay.  But a system with 1024 processors and 512
nodes has 512k pcps with a high potential for large amount of memory being
caught in them.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-09 12:30:56 -07:00
Christoph Lameter 77461ab332 Make vm statistics update interval configurable
Make it configurable.  Code in mm makes the vm statistics intervals
independent from the cache reaper use that opportunity to make it
configurable.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-09 12:30:56 -07:00
Christoph Lameter d1187ed210 vmstat: use our own timer events
vmstat is currently using the cache reaper to periodically bring the
statistics up to date.  The cache reaper does only exists in SLUB as a way to
provide compatibility with SLAB.  This patch removes the vmstat calls from the
slab allocators and provides its own handling.

The advantage is also that we can use a different frequency for the updates.
Refreshing vm stats is a pretty fast job so we can run this every second and
stagger this by only one tick.  This will lead to some overlap in large
systems.  F.e a system running at 250 HZ with 1024 processors will have 4 vm
updates occurring at once.

However, the vm stats update only accesses per node information.  It is only
necessary to stagger the vm statistics updates per processor in each node.  Vm
counter updates occurring on distant nodes will not cause cacheline
contention.

We could implement an alternate approach that runs the first processor on each
node at the second and then each of the other processor on a node on a
subsequent tick.  That may be useful to keep a large amount of the second free
of timer activity.  Maybe the timer folks will have some feedback on this one?

[jirislaby@gmail.com: add missing break]
Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@gmail.com>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-09 12:30:56 -07:00
Rafael J. Wysocki 8bb7844286 Add suspend-related notifications for CPU hotplug
Since nonboot CPUs are now disabled after tasks and devices have been
frozen and the CPU hotplug infrastructure is used for this purpose, we need
special CPU hotplug notifications that will help the CPU-hotplug-aware
subsystems distinguish normal CPU hotplug events from CPU hotplug events
related to a system-wide suspend or resume operation in progress.  This
patch introduces such notifications and causes them to be used during
suspend and resume transitions.  It also changes all of the
CPU-hotplug-aware subsystems to take these notifications into consideration
(for now they are handled in the same way as the corresponding "normal"
ones).

[oleg@tv-sign.ru: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
Cc: Gautham R Shenoy <ego@in.ibm.com>
Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-09 12:30:56 -07:00
Christoph Lameter 4b51d66989 [PATCH] optional ZONE_DMA: optional ZONE_DMA in the VM
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 <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: "Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Kyle McMartin <kyle@mcmartin.ca>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@debian.org>
Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@steeleye.com>
Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Signed-off-by: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-02-11 10:51:18 -08:00
Christoph Lameter 65e458d43d [PATCH] Drop get_zone_counts()
Values are available via ZVC sums.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-02-11 10:51:18 -08:00
Christoph Lameter 05a0416be2 [PATCH] Drop __get_zone_counts()
Values are readily available via ZVC per node and global sums.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-02-11 10:51:18 -08:00
Christoph Lameter 51ed449127 [PATCH] Reorder ZVCs according to cacheline
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 <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-02-11 10:51:17 -08:00
Christoph Lameter d23ad42324 [PATCH] Use ZVC for free_pages
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 <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Michal Piotrowski <michal.k.k.piotrowski@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-02-11 10:51:17 -08:00
Christoph Lameter c878538598 [PATCH] Use ZVC for inactive and active counts
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 <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-02-11 10:51:17 -08:00
Andrew Morton 5a88a13d06 [PATCH] /proc/zoneinfo: fix vm stats display
This early break prevents us from displaying info for the vm stats thresholds
if the zone doesn't have any pages in its per-cpu pagesets.

So my 800MB i386 box says:

Node 0, zone      DMA
  pages free     2365
        min      16
        low      20
        high     24
        active   0
        inactive 0
        scanned  0 (a: 0 i: 0)
        spanned  4096
        present  4044
    nr_anon_pages 0
    nr_mapped    1
    nr_file_pages 0
    nr_slab_reclaimable 0
    nr_slab_unreclaimable 0
    nr_page_table_pages 0
    nr_dirty     0
    nr_writeback 0
    nr_unstable  0
    nr_bounce    0
    nr_vmscan_write 0
        protection: (0, 868, 868)
  pagesets
  all_unreclaimable: 0
  prev_priority:     12
  start_pfn:         0
Node 0, zone   Normal
  pages free     199713
        min      934
        low      1167
        high     1401
        active   10215
        inactive 4507
        scanned  0 (a: 0 i: 0)
        spanned  225280
        present  222420
    nr_anon_pages 2685
    nr_mapped    1110
    nr_file_pages 12055
    nr_slab_reclaimable 2216
    nr_slab_unreclaimable 1527
    nr_page_table_pages 213
    nr_dirty     0
    nr_writeback 0
    nr_unstable  0
    nr_bounce    0
    nr_vmscan_write 0
        protection: (0, 0, 0)
  pagesets
    cpu: 0 pcp: 0
              count: 152
              high:  186
              batch: 31
    cpu: 0 pcp: 1
              count: 13
              high:  62
              batch: 15
  vm stats threshold: 16
    cpu: 1 pcp: 0
              count: 34
              high:  186
              batch: 31
    cpu: 1 pcp: 1
              count: 10
              high:  62
              batch: 15
  vm stats threshold: 16
  all_unreclaimable: 0
  prev_priority:     12
  start_pfn:         4096

Just nuke all that search-for-the-first-non-empty-pageset code.  Dunno why it
was there in the first place..

Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-02-11 10:51:17 -08:00
Helge Deller 15ad7cdcfd [PATCH] struct seq_operations and struct file_operations constification
- 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 <deller@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-12-07 08:39:46 -08:00
Andy Whitcroft ce421c799b [PATCH] mm: cleanup indentation on switch for CPU operations
These patches introduced new switch statements which are indented contrary
to the concensus in mm/*.c.  Fix them up to match that concensus.

    [PATCH] node local per-cpu-pages
    [PATCH] ZVC: Scale thresholds depending on the size of the system
    commit e7c8d5c995
    commit df9ecaba3f

Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-12-07 08:39:23 -08:00
Martin Bligh 3bb1a852ab [PATCH] vmscan: Fix temp_priority race
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 <akpm@osdl.org>

__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 <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-10-28 11:30:50 -07:00
Dave Jones 038b0a6d8d Remove all inclusions of <linux/config.h>
kbuild explicitly includes this at build time.

Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
2006-10-04 03:38:54 -04:00
Christoph Lameter 5d29234362 [PATCH] zone_statistics: Use hot node instead of cold zone_pgdat
Now that we have the node in the hot zone of struct zone we can avoid
accessing zone_pgdat in zone_statistics.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-09-27 08:26:13 -07:00
Andrew Morton e129b5c23c [PATCH] vm: add per-zone writeout counter
The VM is supposed to minimise the number of pages which get written off the
LRU (for IO scheduling efficiency, and for high reclaim-success rates).  But
we don't actually have a clear way of showing how true this is.

So add `nr_vmscan_write' to /proc/vmstat and /proc/zoneinfo - the number of
pages which have been written by the vm scanner in this zone and globally.

Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-09-27 08:26:12 -07:00
Christoph Lameter 972d1a7b14 [PATCH] ZVC: Support NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE / NR_SLAB_UNRECLAIMABLE
Remove the atomic counter for slab_reclaim_pages and replace the counter
and NR_SLAB with two ZVC counter that account for unreclaimable and
reclaimable slab pages: NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE and NR_SLAB_UNRECLAIMABLE.

Change the check in vmscan.c to refer to to NR_SLAB_RECLAIMABLE.  The
intend seems to be to check for slab pages that could be freed.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-09-26 08:48:51 -07:00
Christoph Lameter 39bbcb8f88 [PATCH] mm: do not check unpopulated zones for draining and counter updates
If a zone is unpopulated then we do not need to check for pages that are to
be drained and also not for vm counters that may need to be updated.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-09-26 08:48:51 -07:00
Christoph Lameter 27bf71c2a7 [PATCH] reduce MAX_NR_ZONES: remove display of counters for unconfigured zones
eventcounters: Do not display counters for zones that are not available on an
arch

Do not define or display counters for the DMA32 and the HIGHMEM zone if such
zones were not configured.

[akpm@osdl.org: s390 fix]
[heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com: s390 fix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-09-26 08:48:47 -07:00
Christoph Lameter df9ecaba3f [PATCH] ZVC: Scale thresholds depending on the size of the system
The ZVC counter update threshold is currently set to a fixed value of 32.
This patch sets up the threshold depending on the number of processors and
the sizes of the zones in the system.

With the current threshold of 32, I was able to observe slight contention
when more than 130-140 processors concurrently updated the counters.  The
contention vanished when I either increased the threshold to 64 or used
Andrew's idea of overstepping the interval (see ZVC overstep patch).

However, we saw contention again at 220-230 processors.  So we need higher
values for larger systems.

But the current default is already a bit of an overkill for smaller
systems.  Some systems have tiny zones where precision matters.  For
example i386 and x86_64 have 16M DMA zones and either 900M ZONE_NORMAL or
ZONE_DMA32.  These are even present on SMP and NUMA systems.

The patch here sets up a threshold based on the number of processors in the
system and the size of the zone that these counters are used for.  The
threshold should grow logarithmically, so we use fls() as an easy
approximation.

Results of tests on a system with 1024 processors (4TB RAM)

The following output is from a test allocating 1GB of memory concurrently
on each processor (Forking the process.  So contention on mmap_sem and the
pte locks is not a factor):

                       X                   MIN
TYPE:               CPUS       WALL       WALL        SYS     USER     TOTCPU
fork                   1      0.552      0.552      0.540    0.012      0.552
fork                   4      0.552      0.548      2.164    0.036      2.200
fork                  16      0.564      0.548      8.812    0.164      8.976
fork                 128      0.580      0.572     72.204    1.208     73.412
fork                 256      1.300      0.660    310.400    2.160    312.560
fork                 512      3.512      0.696   1526.836    4.816   1531.652
fork                1020     20.024      0.700  17243.176    6.688  17249.863

So a threshold of 32 is fine up to 128 processors. At 256 processors contention
becomes a factor.

Overstepping the counter (earlier patch) improves the numbers a bit:

fork                   4      0.552      0.548      2.164    0.040      2.204
fork                  16      0.552      0.548      8.640    0.148      8.788
fork                 128      0.556      0.548     69.676    0.956     70.632
fork                 256      0.876      0.636    212.468    2.108    214.576
fork                 512      2.276      0.672    997.324    4.260   1001.584
fork                1020     13.564      0.680  11586.436    6.088  11592.523

Still contention at 512 and 1020. Contention at 1020 is down by a third.
256 still has a slight bit of contention.

After this patch the counter threshold will be set to 125 which reduces
contention significantly:

fork                 128      0.560      0.548     69.776    0.932     70.708
fork                 256      0.636      0.556    143.460    2.036    145.496
fork                 512      0.640      0.548    284.244    4.236    288.480
fork                1020      1.500      0.588   1326.152    8.892   1335.044

[akpm@osdl.org: !SMP build fix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-09-01 11:39:08 -07:00