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2011-01-14mm: page allocator: adjust the per-cpu counter threshold when memory is lowMel Gorman1-21/+0
Commit aa45484 ("calculate a better estimate of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory is low") noted that watermarks were based on the vmstat NR_FREE_PAGES. To avoid synchronization overhead, these counters are maintained on a per-cpu basis and drained both periodically and when a threshold is above a threshold. On large CPU systems, the difference between the estimate and real value of NR_FREE_PAGES can be very high. The system can get into a case where pages are allocated far below the min watermark potentially causing livelock issues. The commit solved the problem by taking a better reading of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory was low. Unfortately, as reported by Shaohua Li this accurate reading can consume a large amount of CPU time on systems with many sockets due to cache line bouncing. This patch takes a different approach. For large machines where counter drift might be unsafe and while kswapd is awake, the per-cpu thresholds for the target pgdat are reduced to limit the level of drift to what should be a safe level. This incurs a performance penalty in heavy memory pressure by a factor that depends on the workload and the machine but the machine should function correctly without accidentally exhausting all memory on a node. There is an additional cost when kswapd wakes and sleeps but the event is not expected to be frequent - in Shaohua's test case, there was one recorded sleep and wake event at least. To ensure that kswapd wakes up, a safe version of zone_watermark_ok() is introduced that takes a more accurate reading of NR_FREE_PAGES when called from wakeup_kswapd, when deciding whether it is really safe to go back to sleep in sleeping_prematurely() and when deciding if a zone is really balanced or not in balance_pgdat(). We are still using an expensive function but limiting how often it is called. When the test case is reproduced, the time spent in the watermark functions is reduced. The following report is on the percentage of time spent cumulatively spent in the functions zone_nr_free_pages(), zone_watermark_ok(), __zone_watermark_ok(), zone_watermark_ok_safe(), zone_page_state_snapshot(), zone_page_state(). vanilla 11.6615% disable-threshold 0.2584% David said: : We had to pull aa454840 "mm: page allocator: calculate a better estimate : of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory is low and kswapd is awake" from 2.6.36 : internally because tests showed that it would cause the machine to stall : as the result of heavy kswapd activity. I merged it back with this fix as : it is pending in the -mm tree and it solves the issue we were seeing, so I : definitely think this should be pushed to -stable (and I would seriously : consider it for 2.6.37 inclusion even at this late date). Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Reported-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Tested-by: Nicolas Bareil <nico@chdir.org> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Kyle McMartin <kyle@mcmartin.ca> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [2.6.37.1, 2.6.36.x] Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2010-09-10mm: page allocator: calculate a better estimate of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory ↵Christoph Lameter1-0/+21
is low and kswapd is awake Ordinarily watermark checks are based on the vmstat NR_FREE_PAGES as it is cheaper than scanning a number of lists. To avoid synchronization overhead, counter deltas are maintained on a per-cpu basis and drained both periodically and when the delta is above a threshold. On large CPU systems, the difference between the estimated and real value of NR_FREE_PAGES can be very high. If NR_FREE_PAGES is much higher than number of real free page in buddy, the VM can allocate pages below min watermark, at worst reducing the real number of pages to zero. Even if the OOM killer kills some victim for freeing memory, it may not free memory if the exit path requires a new page resulting in livelock. This patch introduces a zone_page_state_snapshot() function (courtesy of Christoph) that takes a slightly more accurate view of an arbitrary vmstat counter. It is used to read NR_FREE_PAGES while kswapd is awake to avoid the watermark being accidentally broken. The estimate is not perfect and may result in cache line bounces but is expected to be lighter than the IPI calls necessary to continually drain the per-cpu counters while kswapd is awake. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> 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>
2009-05-18[ARM] Double check memmap is actually valid with a memmap has unexpected ↵Mel Gorman1-0/+15
holes V2 pfn_valid() is meant to be able to tell if a given PFN has valid memmap associated with it or not. In FLATMEM, it is expected that holes always have valid memmap as long as there is valid PFNs either side of the hole. In SPARSEMEM, it is assumed that a valid section has a memmap for the entire section. However, ARM and maybe other embedded architectures in the future free memmap backing holes to save memory on the assumption the memmap is never used. The page_zone linkages are then broken even though pfn_valid() returns true. A walker of the full memmap must then do this additional check to ensure the memmap they are looking at is sane by making sure the zone and PFN linkages are still valid. This is expensive, but walkers of the full memmap are extremely rare. This was caught before for FLATMEM and hacked around but it hits again for SPARSEMEM because the page_zone linkages can look ok where the PFN linkages are totally screwed. This looks like a hatchet job but the reality is that any clean solution would end up consumning all the memory saved by punching these unexpected holes in the memmap. For example, we tried marking the memmap within the section invalid but the section size exceeds the size of the hole in most cases so pfn_valid() starts returning false where valid memmap exists. Shrinking the size of the section would increase memory consumption offsetting the gains. This patch identifies when an architecture is punching unexpected holes in the memmap that the memory model cannot automatically detect and sets ARCH_HAS_HOLES_MEMORYMODEL. At the moment, this is restricted to EP93xx which is the model sub-architecture this has been reported on but may expand later. When set, walkers of the full memmap must call memmap_valid_within() for each PFN and passing in what it expects the page and zone to be for that PFN. If it finds the linkages to be broken, it assumes the memmap is invalid for that PFN. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
2008-09-14mm: mark the correct zone as full when scanning zonelistsMel Gorman1-1/+1
The iterator for_each_zone_zonelist() uses a struct zoneref *z cursor when scanning zonelists to keep track of where in the zonelist it is. The zoneref that is returned corresponds to the the next zone that is to be scanned, not the current one. It was intended to be treated as an opaque list. When the page allocator is scanning a zonelist, it marks elements in the zonelist corresponding to zones that are temporarily full. As the zonelist is being updated, it uses the cursor here; if (NUMA_BUILD) zlc_mark_zone_full(zonelist, z); This is intended to prevent rescanning in the near future but the zoneref cursor does not correspond to the zone that has been found to be full. This is an easy misunderstanding to make so this patch corrects the problem by changing zoneref cursor to be the current zone being scanned instead of the next one. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: <stable@kernel.org> [2.6.26.x] Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-04-28mm: filter based on a nodemask as well as a gfp_maskMel Gorman1-0/+30
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>
2006-12-07[PATCH] remove EXPORT_UNUSED_SYMBOL'ed symbolsAdrian Bunk1-5/+0
In time for 2.6.20, we can get rid of this junk. Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-07-11[PATCH] mm/mmzone.c: EXPORT_UNUSED_SYMBOLAdrian Bunk1-3/+3
This patch marks three unused exports as EXPORT_UNUSED_SYMBOL. Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-06-30Remove obsolete #include <linux/config.h>Jörn Engel1-1/+0
Signed-off-by: Jörn Engel <joern@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de> Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
2006-03-27[PATCH] uninline zone helpersKAMEZAWA Hiroyuki1-0/+50
Helper functions for for_each_online_pgdat/for_each_zone look too big to be inlined. Speed of these helper macro itself is not very important. (inner loops are tend to do more work than this) This patch make helper function to be out-of-lined. inline out-of-line .text 005c0680 005bf6a0 005c0680 - 005bf6a0 = FE0 = 4Kbytes. Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>