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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
- 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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
Increments and decrements are usually grouped rather than mixed. We can
optimize the inc and dec functions for that case.
Increment and decrement the counters by 50% more than the threshold in
those cases and set the differential accordingly. This decreases the need
to update the atomic counters.
The idea came originally from Andrew Morton. The overstepping alone was
sufficient to address the contention issue found when updating the global
and the per zone counters from 160 processors.
Also remove some code in dec_zone_page_state.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The remaining counters in page_state after the zoned VM counter patches
have been applied are all just for show in /proc/vmstat. They have no
essential function for the VM.
We use a simple increment of per cpu variables. In order to avoid the most
severe races we disable preempt. Preempt does not prevent the race between
an increment and an interrupt handler incrementing the same statistics
counter. However, that race is exceedingly rare, we may only loose one
increment or so and there is no requirement (at least not in kernel) that
the vm event counters have to be accurate.
In the non preempt case this results in a simple increment for each
counter. For many architectures this will be reduced by the compiler to a
single instruction. This single instruction is atomic for i386 and x86_64.
And therefore even the rare race condition in an interrupt is avoided for
both architectures in most cases.
The patchset also adds an off switch for embedded systems that allows a
building of linux kernels without these counters.
The implementation of these counters is through inline code that hopefully
results in only a single instruction increment instruction being emitted
(i386, x86_64) or in the increment being hidden though instruction
concurrency (EPIC architectures such as ia64 can get that done).
Benefits:
- VM event counter operations usually reduce to a single inline instruction
on i386 and x86_64.
- No interrupt disable, only preempt disable for the preempt case.
Preempt disable can also be avoided by moving the counter into a spinlock.
- Handling is similar to zoned VM counters.
- Simple and easily extendable.
- Can be omitted to reduce memory use for embedded use.
References:
RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113512330605497&w=2
RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114988082814934&w=2
local_t http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114991748606690&w=2
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115014808400007&r=1&w=2
V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767022346&w=2
V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115047968808926&w=2
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The numa statistics are really event counters. But they are per node and
so we have had special treatment for these counters through additional
fields on the pcp structure. We can now use the per zone nature of the
zoned VM counters to realize these.
This will shrink the size of the pcp structure on NUMA systems. We will
have some room to add additional per zone counters that will all still fit
in the same cacheline.
Bits Prior pcp size Size after patch We can add
------------------------------------------------------------------
64 128 bytes (16 words) 80 bytes (10 words) 48
32 76 bytes (19 words) 56 bytes (14 words) 8 (64 byte cacheline)
72 (128 byte)
Remove the special statistics for numa and replace them with zoned vm
counters. This has the side effect that global sums of these events now
show up in /proc/vmstat.
Also take the opportunity to move the zone_statistics() function from
page_alloc.c into vmstat.c.
Discussions:
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115048227000002&r=1&w=2
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
No callers.
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Conversion of nr_bounce to a per zone counter
nr_bounce is only used for proc output. So it could be left as an event
counter. However, the event counters may not be accurate and nr_bounce is
categorizing types of pages in a zone. So we really need this to also be a
per zone counter.
[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Conversion of nr_unstable to a per zone counter
We need to do some special modifications to the nfs code since there are
multiple cases of disposition and we need to have a page ref for proper
accounting.
This converts the last critical page state of the VM and therefore we need to
remove several functions that were depending on GET_PAGE_STATE_LAST in order
to make the kernel compile again. We are only left with event type counters
in page state.
[akpm@osdl.org: bugfixes]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Conversion of nr_writeback to per zone counter.
This removes the last page_state counter from arch/i386/mm/pgtable.c so we
drop the page_state from there.
[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This makes nr_dirty a per zone counter. Looping over all processors is
avoided during writeback state determination.
The counter aggregation for nr_dirty had to be undone in the NFS layer since
we summed up the page counts from multiple zones. Someone more familiar with
NFS should probably review what I have done.
[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Conversion of nr_page_table_pages to a per zone counter
[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
- Allows reclaim to access counter without looping over processor counts.
- Allows accurate statistics on how many pages are used in a zone by
the slab. This may become useful to balance slab allocations over
various zones.
[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The current NR_FILE_MAPPED is used by zone reclaim and the dirty load
calculation as the number of mapped pagecache pages. However, that is not
true. NR_FILE_MAPPED includes the mapped anonymous pages. This patch
separates those and therefore allows an accurate tracking of the anonymous
pages per zone.
It then becomes possible to determine the number of unmapped pages per zone
and we can avoid scanning for unmapped pages if there are none.
Also it may now be possible to determine the mapped/unmapped ratio in
get_dirty_limit. Isnt the number of anonymous pages irrelevant in that
calculation?
Note that this will change the meaning of the number of mapped pages reported
in /proc/vmstat /proc/meminfo and in the per node statistics. This may affect
user space tools that monitor these counters! NR_FILE_MAPPED works like
NR_FILE_DIRTY. It is only valid for pagecache pages.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Currently a single atomic variable is used to establish the size of the page
cache in the whole machine. The zoned VM counters have the same method of
implementation as the nr_pagecache code but also allow the determination of
the pagecache size per zone.
Remove the special implementation for nr_pagecache and make it a zoned counter
named NR_FILE_PAGES.
Updates of the page cache counters are always performed with interrupts off.
We can therefore use the __ variant here.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
nr_mapped is important because it allows a determination of how many pages of
a zone are not mapped, which would allow a more efficient means of determining
when we need to reclaim memory in a zone.
We take the nr_mapped field out of the page state structure and define a new
per zone counter named NR_FILE_MAPPED (the anonymous pages will be split off
from NR_MAPPED in the next patch).
We replace the use of nr_mapped in various kernel locations. This avoids the
looping over all processors in try_to_free_pages(), writeback, reclaim (swap +
zone reclaim).
[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Per zone counter infrastructure
The counters that we currently have for the VM are split per processor. The
processor however has not much to do with the zone these pages belong to. We
cannot tell f.e. how many ZONE_DMA pages are dirty.
So we are blind to potentially inbalances in the usage of memory in various
zones. F.e. in a NUMA system we cannot tell how many pages are dirty on a
particular node. If we knew then we could put measures into the VM to balance
the use of memory between different zones and different nodes in a NUMA
system. For example it would be possible to limit the dirty pages per node so
that fast local memory is kept available even if a process is dirtying huge
amounts of pages.
Another example is zone reclaim. We do not know how many unmapped pages exist
per zone. So we just have to try to reclaim. If it is not working then we
pause and try again later. It would be better if we knew when it makes sense
to reclaim unmapped pages from a zone. This patchset allows the determination
of the number of unmapped pages per zone. We can remove the zone reclaim
interval with the counters introduced here.
Futhermore the ability to have various usage statistics available will allow
the development of new NUMA balancing algorithms that may be able to improve
the decision making in the scheduler of when to move a process to another node
and hopefully will also enable automatic page migration through a user space
program that can analyse the memory load distribution and then rebalance
memory use in order to increase performance.
The counter framework here implements differential counters for each processor
in struct zone. The differential counters are consolidated when a threshold
is exceeded (like done in the current implementation for nr_pageache), when
slab reaping occurs or when a consolidation function is called.
Consolidation uses atomic operations and accumulates counters per zone in the
zone structure and also globally in the vm_stat array. VM functions can
access the counts by simply indexing a global or zone specific array.
The arrangement of counters in an array also simplifies processing when output
has to be generated for /proc/*.
Counters can be updated by calling inc/dec_zone_page_state or
_inc/dec_zone_page_state analogous to *_page_state. The second group of
functions can be called if it is known that interrupts are disabled.
Special optimized increment and decrement functions are provided. These can
avoid certain checks and use increment or decrement instructions that an
architecture may provide.
We also add a new CONFIG_DMA_IS_NORMAL that signifies that an architecture can
do DMA to all memory and therefore ZONE_NORMAL will not be populated. This is
only currently set for IA64 SGI SN2 and currently only affects
node_page_state(). In the best case node_page_state can be reduced to
retrieving a single counter for the one zone on the node.
[akpm@osdl.org: cleanups]
[akpm@osdl.org: export vm_stat[] for filesystems]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
NOTE: ZVC are *not* the lightweight event counters. ZVCs are reliable whereas
event counters do not need to be.
Zone based VM statistics are necessary to be able to determine what the state
of memory in one zone is. In a NUMA system this can be helpful for local
reclaim and other memory optimizations that may be able to shift VM load in
order to get more balanced memory use.
It is also useful to know how the computing load affects the memory
allocations on various zones. This patchset allows the retrieval of that data
from userspace.
The patchset introduces a framework for counters that is a cross between the
existing page_stats --which are simply global counters split per cpu-- and the
approach of deferred incremental updates implemented for nr_pagecache.
Small per cpu 8 bit counters are added to struct zone. If the counter exceeds
certain thresholds then the counters are accumulated in an array of
atomic_long in the zone and in a global array that sums up all zone values.
The small 8 bit counters are next to the per cpu page pointers and so they
will be in high in the cpu cache when pages are allocated and freed.
Access to VM counter information for a zone and for the whole machine is then
possible by simply indexing an array (Thanks to Nick Piggin for pointing out
that approach). The access to the total number of pages of various types does
no longer require the summing up of all per cpu counters.
Benefits of this patchset right now:
- Ability for UP and SMP configuration to determine how memory
is balanced between the DMA, NORMAL and HIGHMEM zones.
- loops over all processors are avoided in writeback and
reclaim paths. We can avoid caching the writeback information
because the needed information is directly accessible.
- Special handling for nr_pagecache removed.
- zone_reclaim_interval vanishes since VM stats can now determine
when it is worth to do local reclaim.
- Fast inline per node page state determination.
- Accurate counters in /sys/devices/system/node/node*/meminfo. Current
counters are counting simply which processor allocated a page somewhere
and guestimate based on that. So the counters were not useful to show
the actual distribution of page use on a specific zone.
- The swap_prefetch patch requires per node statistics in order to
figure out when processors of a node can prefetch. This patch provides
some of the needed numbers.
- Detailed VM counters available in more /proc and /sys status files.
References to earlier discussions:
V1 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113511649910826&w=2
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114980851924230&w=2
V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115014697910351&w=2
V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767318740&w=2
Performance tests with AIM7 did not show any regressions. Seems to be a tad
faster even. Tested on ia64/NUMA. Builds fine on i386, SMP / UP. Includes
fixes for s390/arm/uml arch code.
This patch:
Move counter code from page_alloc.c/page-flags.h to vmstat.c/h.
Create vmstat.c/vmstat.h by separating the counter code and the proc
functions.
Move the vm_stat_text array before zoneinfo_show.
[akpm@osdl.org: s390 build fix]
[akpm@osdl.org: HOTPLUG_CPU build fix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
