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authorJesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com>2023-01-17 16:40:00 +0300
committerVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>2023-06-02 11:24:33 +0300
commitd0bf7d5759c1d89fb013aa41cca5832e00b9632a (patch)
tree78f025ec6d87624deea14e7ee46fddbdc5ca50a6 /mm/kfence
parent44c026a73be8038f03dbdeef028b642880cf1511 (diff)
downloadlinux-d0bf7d5759c1d89fb013aa41cca5832e00b9632a.tar.xz
mm/slab: introduce kmem_cache flag SLAB_NO_MERGE
Allow API users of kmem_cache_create to specify that they don't want any slab merge or aliasing (with similar sized objects). Use this in kfence_test. The SKB (sk_buff) kmem_cache slab is critical for network performance. Network stack uses kmem_cache_{alloc,free}_bulk APIs to gain performance by amortising the alloc/free cost. For the bulk API to perform efficiently the slub fragmentation need to be low. Especially for the SLUB allocator, the efficiency of bulk free API depend on objects belonging to the same slab (page). When running different network performance microbenchmarks, I started to notice that performance was reduced (slightly) when machines had longer uptimes. I believe the cause was 'skbuff_head_cache' got aliased/merged into the general slub for 256 bytes sized objects (with my kernel config, without CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY). For SKB kmem_cache network stack have reasons for not merging, but it varies depending on kernel config (e.g. CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY). We want to explicitly set SLAB_NO_MERGE for this kmem_cache. Another use case for the flag has been described by David Sterba [1]: > This can be used for more fine grained control over the caches or for > debugging builds where separate slabs can verify that no objects leak. > The slab_nomerge boot option is too coarse and would need to be > enabled on all testing hosts. There are some other ways how to disable > merging, e.g. a slab constructor but this disables poisoning besides > that it adds additional overhead. Other flags are internal and may > have other semantics. > A concrete example what motivates the flag. During 'btrfs balance' > slab top reported huge increase in caches like > 1330095 1330095 100% 0.10K 34105 39 136420K Acpi-ParseExt > 1734684 1734684 100% 0.14K 61953 28 247812K pid_namespace > 8244036 6873075 83% 0.11K 229001 36 916004K khugepaged_mm_slot > which was confusing and that it's because of slab merging was not the > first idea. After rebooting with slab_nomerge all the caches were > from btrfs_ namespace as expected. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230524101748.30714-1-dsterba@suse.com/ [ vbabka@suse.cz: rename to SLAB_NO_MERGE, change the flag value to the one proposed by David so it does not collide with internal SLAB/SLUB flags, write a comment for the flag, expand changelog, drop the skbuff part to be handled spearately ] Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/167396280045.539803.7540459812377220500.stgit@firesoul/ Reported-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com> Signed-off-by: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Acked-by: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <brouer@redhat.com> Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/kfence')
-rw-r--r--mm/kfence/kfence_test.c7
1 files changed, 3 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/mm/kfence/kfence_test.c b/mm/kfence/kfence_test.c
index 6aee19a79236..9e008a336d9f 100644
--- a/mm/kfence/kfence_test.c
+++ b/mm/kfence/kfence_test.c
@@ -191,11 +191,10 @@ static size_t setup_test_cache(struct kunit *test, size_t size, slab_flags_t fla
kunit_info(test, "%s: size=%zu, ctor=%ps\n", __func__, size, ctor);
/*
- * Use SLAB_NOLEAKTRACE to prevent merging with existing caches. Any
- * other flag in SLAB_NEVER_MERGE also works. Use SLAB_ACCOUNT to
- * allocate via memcg, if enabled.
+ * Use SLAB_NO_MERGE to prevent merging with existing caches.
+ * Use SLAB_ACCOUNT to allocate via memcg, if enabled.
*/
- flags |= SLAB_NOLEAKTRACE | SLAB_ACCOUNT;
+ flags |= SLAB_NO_MERGE | SLAB_ACCOUNT;
test_cache = kmem_cache_create("test", size, 1, flags, ctor);
KUNIT_ASSERT_TRUE_MSG(test, test_cache, "could not create cache");