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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
