linux/mm
Rik van Riel 5beb493052 mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue
The old anon_vma code can lead to scalability issues with heavily forking
workloads.  Specifically, each anon_vma will be shared between the parent
process and all its child processes.

In a workload with 1000 child processes and a VMA with 1000 anonymous
pages per process that get COWed, this leads to a system with a million
anonymous pages in the same anon_vma, each of which is mapped in just one
of the 1000 processes.  However, the current rmap code needs to walk them
all, leading to O(N) scanning complexity for each page.

This can result in systems where one CPU is walking the page tables of
1000 processes in page_referenced_one, while all other CPUs are stuck on
the anon_vma lock.  This leads to catastrophic failure for a benchmark
like AIM7, where the total number of processes can reach in the tens of
thousands.  Real workloads are still a factor 10 less process intensive
than AIM7, but they are catching up.

This patch changes the way anon_vmas and VMAs are linked, which allows us
to associate multiple anon_vmas with a VMA.  At fork time, each child
process gets its own anon_vmas, in which its COWed pages will be
instantiated.  The parents' anon_vma is also linked to the VMA, because
non-COWed pages could be present in any of the children.

This reduces rmap scanning complexity to O(1) for the pages of the 1000
child processes, with O(N) complexity for at most 1/N pages in the system.
 This reduces the average scanning cost in heavily forking workloads from
O(N) to 2.

The only real complexity in this patch stems from the fact that linking a
VMA to anon_vmas now involves memory allocations.  This means vma_adjust
can fail, if it needs to attach a VMA to anon_vma structures.  This in
turn means error handling needs to be added to the calling functions.

A second source of complexity is that, because there can be multiple
anon_vmas, the anon_vma linking in vma_adjust can no longer be done under
"the" anon_vma lock.  To prevent the rmap code from walking up an
incomplete VMA, this patch introduces the VM_LOCK_RMAP VMA flag.  This bit
flag uses the same slot as the NOMMU VM_MAPPED_COPY, with an ifdef in mm.h
to make sure it is impossible to compile a kernel that needs both symbolic
values for the same bitflag.

Some test results:

Without the anon_vma changes, when AIM7 hits around 9.7k users (on a test
box with 16GB RAM and not quite enough IO), the system ends up running
>99% in system time, with every CPU on the same anon_vma lock in the
pageout code.

With these changes, AIM7 hits the cross-over point around 29.7k users.
This happens with ~99% IO wait time, there never seems to be any spike in
system time.  The anon_vma lock contention appears to be resolved.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Larry Woodman <lwoodman@redhat.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
..
backing-dev.c flusher: Fix PF_FROZEN race 2009-12-03 13:49:43 +01:00
bootmem.c x86: Make 64 bit use early_res instead of bootmem before slab 2010-02-12 09:41:59 -08:00
bounce.c block: remove some includings of blktrace_api.h 2009-06-16 11:19:36 +02:00
debug-pagealloc.c generic debug pagealloc 2009-04-01 08:59:13 -07:00
dmapool.c dmapools: protect page_list walk in show_pools() 2009-06-30 18:56:00 -07:00
fadvise.c readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
failslab.c failslab: add ability to filter slab caches 2010-02-26 19:19:39 +02:00
filemap_xip.c mm: clean up mm_counter 2010-03-06 11:26:23 -08:00
filemap.c mm: use rlimit helpers 2010-03-06 11:26:24 -08:00
fremap.c mm: clean up mm_counter 2010-03-06 11:26:23 -08:00
highmem.c highmem: Fix debug_kmap_atomic() to also handle KM_IRQ_PTE, KM_NMI, and KM_NMI_PTE 2009-11-10 04:15:47 +01:00
hugetlb.c Merge branch 'for-linus' of master.kernel.org:/home/rmk/linux-2.6-arm 2010-03-01 09:15:15 -08:00
hwpoison-inject.c HWPOISON: Don't do early filtering if filter is disabled 2009-12-16 12:20:01 +01:00
init-mm.c mm: consolidate init_mm definition 2009-06-16 19:47:28 -07:00
internal.h HWPOISON: add an interface to switch off/on all the page filters 2009-12-16 12:19:59 +01:00
Kconfig Merge branch 'x86-bootmem-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2010-03-03 08:15:05 -08:00
Kconfig.debug trivial: improve help text for mm debug config options 2009-09-21 15:14:57 +02:00
kmemcheck.c kmemcheck: add hooks for the page allocator 2009-06-15 15:48:33 +02:00
kmemleak-test.c percpu: clean up percpu variable definitions 2009-06-24 15:13:48 +09:00
kmemleak.c Merge branch 'kmemleak' of git://linux-arm.org/linux-2.6 2009-12-17 16:00:19 -08:00
ksm.c mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
maccess.c maccess,probe_kernel: Allow arch specific override probe_kernel_(read|write) 2010-01-07 11:58:36 -06:00
madvise.c HWPOISON: Add a madvise() injector for soft page offlining 2009-12-16 12:20:00 +01:00
Makefile make generic_acl slightly more generic 2009-12-16 12:16:49 -05:00
memcontrol.c mm/memcontrol.c: fix "integer as NULL pointer" sparse warning 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
memory_hotplug.c memory-hotplug: create /sys/firmware/memmap entry for new memory 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
memory-failure.c mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
memory.c mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
mempolicy.c mm/mempolicy.c: fix indentation of the comments of do_migrate_pages 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
mempool.c mm: remove broken 'kzalloc' mempool 2009-09-22 07:17:35 -07:00
migrate.c mm/migrate.c: kill anon local variable from migrate_page_copy 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
mincore.c mm: hugetlb: fix hugepage memory leak in mincore() 2009-12-15 08:53:24 -08:00
mlock.c mm: use rlimit helpers 2010-03-06 11:26:24 -08:00
mm_init.c
mmap.c mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
mmu_context.c mm: export use_mm/unuse_mm to modules 2010-01-15 01:43:28 -08:00
mmu_notifier.c ksm: add mmu_notifier set_pte_at_notify() 2009-09-22 07:17:31 -07:00
mmzone.c [ARM] Double check memmap is actually valid with a memmap has unexpected holes V2 2009-05-18 11:22:24 +01:00
mprotect.c perf: Do the big rename: Performance Counters -> Performance Events 2009-09-21 14:28:04 +02:00
mremap.c mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
msync.c
nommu.c mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
oom_kill.c mm: clean up mm_counter 2010-03-06 11:26:23 -08:00
page_alloc.c mm: restore zone->all_unreclaimable to independence word 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
page_cgroup.c memory hotplug: alloc page from other node in memory online 2009-09-22 07:17:26 -07:00
page_io.c swap: rework map_swap_page() again 2009-12-15 08:53:16 -08:00
page_isolation.c
page-writeback.c writeback: remove unused nonblocking and congestion checks 2009-12-03 13:54:25 +01:00
pagewalk.c mm hugetlb: add hugepage support to pagemap 2009-12-15 08:53:24 -08:00
percpu.c early_res: Add free_early_partial() 2010-02-26 08:25:35 +01:00
prio_tree.c
quicklist.c cpumask: use new-style cpumask ops in mm/quicklist. 2009-09-24 09:34:52 +09:30
readahead.c readahead: introduce FMODE_RANDOM for POSIX_FADV_RANDOM 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
rmap.c mm: change anon_vma linking to fix multi-process server scalability issue 2010-03-06 11:26:26 -08:00
shmem.c Fix breakage in shmem.c 2009-12-16 19:48:48 -05:00
slab.c Merge branches 'slab/cleanups', 'slab/failslab', 'slab/fixes' and 'slub/percpu' into slab-for-linus 2010-03-04 12:07:50 +02:00
slob.c slab: remove duplicate kmem_cache_init_late() declarations 2009-08-06 11:36:25 +03:00
slub.c SLUB: Fix per-cpu merge conflict 2010-03-04 12:09:43 +02:00
sparse-vmemmap.c sparsemem: Put mem map for one node together. 2010-02-12 09:42:38 -08:00
sparse.c sparsemem: Fix compilation on PowerPC 2010-03-01 17:59:24 -08:00
swap_state.c mm: add_to_swap_cache() does not return -EEXIST 2009-09-22 07:17:35 -07:00
swap.c mm: remove free_hot_page() 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
swapfile.c mm: count swap usage 2010-03-06 11:26:24 -08:00
thrash.c mm: pass mm to grab_swap_token 2009-06-23 12:50:05 -07:00
truncate.c vfs: Fix vmtruncate() regression 2010-01-13 16:09:33 -08:00
util.c nommu: don't need get_unmapped_area() for NOMMU 2010-01-16 12:15:40 -08:00
vmalloc.c mm: purge fragmented percpu vmap blocks 2010-02-02 12:50:47 -08:00
vmscan.c mm: restore zone->all_unreclaimable to independence word 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00
vmstat.c mm: restore zone->all_unreclaimable to independence word 2010-03-06 11:26:25 -08:00