<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>linux-toradex.git/include/linux/cpuset.h, branch v2.6.23.12</title>
<subtitle>Linux kernel for Apalis and Colibri modules</subtitle>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/'/>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] mark struct file_operations const 1</title>
<updated>2007-02-12T17:48:44+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Arjan van de Ven</name>
<email>arjan@linux.intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2007-02-12T08:55:28+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=540473208f8ac71c25a87e1a2670c3c18dd4d6db'/>
<id>540473208f8ac71c25a87e1a2670c3c18dd4d6db</id>
<content type='text'>
Many struct file_operations in the kernel can be "const".  Marking them const
moves these to the .rodata section, which avoids false sharing with potential
dirty data.  In addition it'll catch accidental writes at compile time to
these shared resources.

Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven &lt;arjan@linux.intel.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Many struct file_operations in the kernel can be "const".  Marking them const
moves these to the .rodata section, which avoids false sharing with potential
dirty data.  In addition it'll catch accidental writes at compile time to
these shared resources.

Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven &lt;arjan@linux.intel.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] cpuset procfs warning fix</title>
<updated>2006-12-30T18:56:43+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Andrew Morton</name>
<email>akpm@osdl.org</email>
</author>
<published>2006-12-30T00:49:04+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=089e34b60033863549fbe561d31ac8c778a20e7f'/>
<id>089e34b60033863549fbe561d31ac8c778a20e7f</id>
<content type='text'>
fs/proc/base.c:1869: warning: initialization discards qualifiers from pointer target type
fs/proc/base.c:2150: warning: initialization discards qualifiers from pointer target type

Cc: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
fs/proc/base.c:1869: warning: initialization discards qualifiers from pointer target type
fs/proc/base.c:2150: warning: initialization discards qualifiers from pointer target type

Cc: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] cpuset: rework cpuset_zone_allowed api</title>
<updated>2006-12-13T17:05:49+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Jackson</name>
<email>pj@sgi.com</email>
</author>
<published>2006-12-13T08:34:25+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=02a0e53d8227aff5e62e0433f82c12c1c2805fd6'/>
<id>02a0e53d8227aff5e62e0433f82c12c1c2805fd6</id>
<content type='text'>
Elaborate the API for calling cpuset_zone_allowed(), so that users have to
explicitly choose between the two variants:

  cpuset_zone_allowed_hardwall()
  cpuset_zone_allowed_softwall()

Until now, whether or not you got the hardwall flavor depended solely on
whether or not you or'd in the __GFP_HARDWALL gfp flag to the gfp_mask
argument.

If you didn't specify __GFP_HARDWALL, you implicitly got the softwall
version.

Unfortunately, this meant that users would end up with the softwall version
without thinking about it.  Since only the softwall version might sleep,
this led to bugs with possible sleeping in interrupt context on more than
one occassion.

The hardwall version requires that the current tasks mems_allowed allows
the node of the specified zone (or that you're in interrupt or that
__GFP_THISNODE is set or that you're on a one cpuset system.)

The softwall version, depending on the gfp_mask, might allow a node if it
was allowed in the nearest enclusing cpuset marked mem_exclusive (which
requires taking the cpuset lock 'callback_mutex' to evaluate.)

This patch removes the cpuset_zone_allowed() call, and forces the caller to
explicitly choose between the hardwall and the softwall case.

If the caller wants the gfp_mask to determine this choice, they should (1)
be sure they can sleep or that __GFP_HARDWALL is set, and (2) invoke the
cpuset_zone_allowed_softwall() routine.

This adds another 100 or 200 bytes to the kernel text space, due to the few
lines of nearly duplicate code at the top of both cpuset_zone_allowed_*
routines.  It should save a few instructions executed for the calls that
turned into calls of cpuset_zone_allowed_hardwall, thanks to not having to
set (before the call) then check (within the call) the __GFP_HARDWALL flag.

For the most critical call, from get_page_from_freelist(), the same
instructions are executed as before -- the old cpuset_zone_allowed()
routine it used to call is the same code as the
cpuset_zone_allowed_softwall() routine that it calls now.

Not a perfect win, but seems worth it, to reduce this chance of hitting a
sleeping with irq off complaint again.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Elaborate the API for calling cpuset_zone_allowed(), so that users have to
explicitly choose between the two variants:

  cpuset_zone_allowed_hardwall()
  cpuset_zone_allowed_softwall()

Until now, whether or not you got the hardwall flavor depended solely on
whether or not you or'd in the __GFP_HARDWALL gfp flag to the gfp_mask
argument.

If you didn't specify __GFP_HARDWALL, you implicitly got the softwall
version.

Unfortunately, this meant that users would end up with the softwall version
without thinking about it.  Since only the softwall version might sleep,
this led to bugs with possible sleeping in interrupt context on more than
one occassion.

The hardwall version requires that the current tasks mems_allowed allows
the node of the specified zone (or that you're in interrupt or that
__GFP_THISNODE is set or that you're on a one cpuset system.)

The softwall version, depending on the gfp_mask, might allow a node if it
was allowed in the nearest enclusing cpuset marked mem_exclusive (which
requires taking the cpuset lock 'callback_mutex' to evaluate.)

This patch removes the cpuset_zone_allowed() call, and forces the caller to
explicitly choose between the hardwall and the softwall case.

If the caller wants the gfp_mask to determine this choice, they should (1)
be sure they can sleep or that __GFP_HARDWALL is set, and (2) invoke the
cpuset_zone_allowed_softwall() routine.

This adds another 100 or 200 bytes to the kernel text space, due to the few
lines of nearly duplicate code at the top of both cpuset_zone_allowed_*
routines.  It should save a few instructions executed for the calls that
turned into calls of cpuset_zone_allowed_hardwall, thanks to not having to
set (before the call) then check (within the call) the __GFP_HARDWALL flag.

For the most critical call, from get_page_from_freelist(), the same
instructions are executed as before -- the old cpuset_zone_allowed()
routine it used to call is the same code as the
cpuset_zone_allowed_softwall() routine that it calls now.

Not a perfect win, but seems worth it, to reduce this chance of hitting a
sleeping with irq off complaint again.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] struct seq_operations and struct file_operations constification</title>
<updated>2006-12-07T16:39:46+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Helge Deller</name>
<email>deller@gmx.de</email>
</author>
<published>2006-12-07T04:40:36+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=15ad7cdcfd76450d4beebc789ec646664238184d'/>
<id>15ad7cdcfd76450d4beebc789ec646664238184d</id>
<content type='text'>
 - 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 &lt;deller@gmx.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
 - 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 &lt;deller@gmx.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup</title>
<updated>2006-12-07T16:39:20+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Jackson</name>
<email>pj@sgi.com</email>
</author>
<published>2006-12-07T04:31:48+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=9276b1bc96a132f4068fdee00983c532f43d3a26'/>
<id>9276b1bc96a132f4068fdee00983c532f43d3a26</id>
<content type='text'>
Optimize the critical zonelist scanning for free pages in the kernel memory
allocator by caching the zones that were found to be full recently, and
skipping them.

Remembers the zones in a zonelist that were short of free memory in the
last second.  And it stashes a zone-to-node table in the zonelist struct,
to optimize that conversion (minimize its cache footprint.)

Recent changes:

    This differs in a significant way from a similar patch that I
    posted a week ago.  Now, instead of having a nodemask_t of
    recently full nodes, I have a bitmask of recently full zones.
    This solves a problem that last weeks patch had, which on
    systems with multiple zones per node (such as DMA zone) would
    take seeing any of these zones full as meaning that all zones
    on that node were full.

    Also I changed names - from "zonelist faster" to "zonelist cache",
    as that seemed to better convey what we're doing here - caching
    some of the key zonelist state (for faster access.)

    See below for some performance benchmark results.  After all that
    discussion with David on why I didn't need them, I went and got
    some ;).  I wanted to verify that I had not hurt the normal case
    of memory allocation noticeably.  At least for my one little
    microbenchmark, I found (1) the normal case wasn't affected, and
    (2) workloads that forced scanning across multiple nodes for
    memory improved up to 10% fewer System CPU cycles and lower
    elapsed clock time ('sys' and 'real').  Good.  See details, below.

    I didn't have the logic in get_page_from_freelist() for various
    full nodes and zone reclaim failures correct.  That should be
    fixed up now - notice the new goto labels zonelist_scan,
    this_zone_full, and try_next_zone, in get_page_from_freelist().

There are two reasons I persued this alternative, over some earlier
proposals that would have focused on optimizing the fake numa
emulation case by caching the last useful zone:

 1) Contrary to what I said before, we (SGI, on large ia64 sn2 systems)
    have seen real customer loads where the cost to scan the zonelist
    was a problem, due to many nodes being full of memory before
    we got to a node we could use.  Or at least, I think we have.
    This was related to me by another engineer, based on experiences
    from some time past.  So this is not guaranteed.  Most likely, though.

    The following approach should help such real numa systems just as
    much as it helps fake numa systems, or any combination thereof.

 2) The effort to distinguish fake from real numa, using node_distance,
    so that we could cache a fake numa node and optimize choosing
    it over equivalent distance fake nodes, while continuing to
    properly scan all real nodes in distance order, was going to
    require a nasty blob of zonelist and node distance munging.

    The following approach has no new dependency on node distances or
    zone sorting.

See comment in the patch below for a description of what it actually does.

Technical details of note (or controversy):

 - See the use of "zlc_active" and "did_zlc_setup" below, to delay
   adding any work for this new mechanism until we've looked at the
   first zone in zonelist.  I figured the odds of the first zone
   having the memory we needed were high enough that we should just
   look there, first, then get fancy only if we need to keep looking.

 - Some odd hackery was needed to add items to struct zonelist, while
   not tripping up the custom zonelists built by the mm/mempolicy.c
   code for MPOL_BIND.  My usual wordy comments below explain this.
   Search for "MPOL_BIND".

 - Some per-node data in the struct zonelist is now modified frequently,
   with no locking.  Multiple CPU cores on a node could hit and mangle
   this data.  The theory is that this is just performance hint data,
   and the memory allocator will work just fine despite any such mangling.
   The fields at risk are the struct 'zonelist_cache' fields 'fullzones'
   (a bitmask) and 'last_full_zap' (unsigned long jiffies).  It should
   all be self correcting after at most a one second delay.

 - This still does a linear scan of the same lengths as before.  All
   I've optimized is making the scan faster, not algorithmically
   shorter.  It is now able to scan a compact array of 'unsigned
   short' in the case of many full nodes, so one cache line should
   cover quite a few nodes, rather than each node hitting another
   one or two new and distinct cache lines.

 - If both Andi and Nick don't find this too complicated, I will be
   (pleasantly) flabbergasted.

 - I removed the comment claiming we only use one cachline's worth of
   zonelist.  We seem, at least in the fake numa case, to have put the
   lie to that claim.

 - I pay no attention to the various watermarks and such in this performance
   hint.  A node could be marked full for one watermark, and then skipped
   over when searching for a page using a different watermark.  I think
   that's actually quite ok, as it will tend to slightly increase the
   spreading of memory over other nodes, away from a memory stressed node.

===============

Performance - some benchmark results and analysis:

This benchmark runs a memory hog program that uses multiple
threads to touch alot of memory as quickly as it can.

Multiple runs were made, touching 12, 38, 64 or 90 GBytes out of
the total 96 GBytes on the system, and using 1, 19, 37, or 55
threads (on a 56 CPU system.)  System, user and real (elapsed)
timings were recorded for each run, shown in units of seconds,
in the table below.

Two kernels were tested - 2.6.18-mm3 and the same kernel with
this zonelist caching patch added.  The table also shows the
percentage improvement the zonelist caching sys time is over
(lower than) the stock *-mm kernel.

      number     2.6.18-mm3	   zonelist-cache    delta (&lt; 0 good)	percent
 GBs    N  	------------	   --------------    ----------------	systime
 mem threads   sys user  real	  sys  user  real     sys  user  real	 better
  12	 1     153   24   177	  151	 24   176      -2     0    -1	   1%
  12	19	99   22     8	   99	 22	8	0     0     0	   0%
  12	37     111   25     6	  112	 25	6	1     0     0	  -0%
  12	55     115   25     5	  110	 23	5      -5    -2     0	   4%
  38	 1     502   74   576	  497	 73   570      -5    -1    -6	   0%
  38	19     426   78    48	  373	 76    39     -53    -2    -9	  12%
  38	37     544   83    36	  547	 82    36	3    -1     0	  -0%
  38	55     501   77    23	  511	 80    24      10     3     1	  -1%
  64	 1     917  125  1042	  890	124  1014     -27    -1   -28	   2%
  64	19    1118  138   119	  965	141   103    -153     3   -16	  13%
  64	37    1202  151    94	 1136	150    81     -66    -1   -13	   5%
  64	55    1118  141    61	 1072	140    58     -46    -1    -3	   4%
  90	 1    1342  177  1519	 1275	174  1450     -67    -3   -69	   4%
  90	19    2392  199   192	 2116	189   176    -276   -10   -16	  11%
  90	37    3313  238   175	 2972	225   145    -341   -13   -30	  10%
  90	55    1948  210   104	 1843	213   100    -105     3    -4	   5%

Notes:
 1) This test ran a memory hog program that started a specified number N of
    threads, and had each thread allocate and touch 1/N'th of
    the total memory to be used in the test run in a single loop,
    writing a constant word to memory, one store every 4096 bytes.
    Watching this test during some earlier trial runs, I would see
    each of these threads sit down on one CPU and stay there, for
    the remainder of the pass, a different CPU for each thread.

 2) The 'real' column is not comparable to the 'sys' or 'user' columns.
    The 'real' column is seconds wall clock time elapsed, from beginning
    to end of that test pass.  The 'sys' and 'user' columns are total
    CPU seconds spent on that test pass.  For a 19 thread test run,
    for example, the sum of 'sys' and 'user' could be up to 19 times the
    number of 'real' elapsed wall clock seconds.

 3) Tests were run on a fresh, single-user boot, to minimize the amount
    of memory already in use at the start of the test, and to minimize
    the amount of background activity that might interfere.

 4) Tests were done on a 56 CPU, 28 Node system with 96 GBytes of RAM.

 5) Notice that the 'real' time gets large for the single thread runs, even
    though the measured 'sys' and 'user' times are modest.  I'm not sure what
    that means - probably something to do with it being slow for one thread to
    be accessing memory along ways away.  Perhaps the fake numa system, running
    ostensibly the same workload, would not show this substantial degradation
    of 'real' time for one thread on many nodes -- lets hope not.

 6) The high thread count passes (one thread per CPU - on 55 of 56 CPUs)
    ran quite efficiently, as one might expect.  Each pair of threads needed
    to allocate and touch the memory on the node the two threads shared, a
    pleasantly parallizable workload.

 7) The intermediate thread count passes, when asking for alot of memory forcing
    them to go to a few neighboring nodes, improved the most with this zonelist
    caching patch.

Conclusions:
 * This zonelist cache patch probably makes little difference one way or the
   other for most workloads on real numa hardware, if those workloads avoid
   heavy off node allocations.
 * For memory intensive workloads requiring substantial off-node allocations
   on real numa hardware, this patch improves both kernel and elapsed timings
   up to ten per-cent.
 * For fake numa systems, I'm optimistic, but will have to leave that up to
   Rohit Seth to actually test (once I get him a 2.6.18 backport.)

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Cc: Rohit Seth &lt;rohitseth@google.com&gt;
Cc: Christoph Lameter &lt;clameter@engr.sgi.com&gt;
Cc: David Rientjes &lt;rientjes@cs.washington.edu&gt;
Cc: Paul Menage &lt;menage@google.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Optimize the critical zonelist scanning for free pages in the kernel memory
allocator by caching the zones that were found to be full recently, and
skipping them.

Remembers the zones in a zonelist that were short of free memory in the
last second.  And it stashes a zone-to-node table in the zonelist struct,
to optimize that conversion (minimize its cache footprint.)

Recent changes:

    This differs in a significant way from a similar patch that I
    posted a week ago.  Now, instead of having a nodemask_t of
    recently full nodes, I have a bitmask of recently full zones.
    This solves a problem that last weeks patch had, which on
    systems with multiple zones per node (such as DMA zone) would
    take seeing any of these zones full as meaning that all zones
    on that node were full.

    Also I changed names - from "zonelist faster" to "zonelist cache",
    as that seemed to better convey what we're doing here - caching
    some of the key zonelist state (for faster access.)

    See below for some performance benchmark results.  After all that
    discussion with David on why I didn't need them, I went and got
    some ;).  I wanted to verify that I had not hurt the normal case
    of memory allocation noticeably.  At least for my one little
    microbenchmark, I found (1) the normal case wasn't affected, and
    (2) workloads that forced scanning across multiple nodes for
    memory improved up to 10% fewer System CPU cycles and lower
    elapsed clock time ('sys' and 'real').  Good.  See details, below.

    I didn't have the logic in get_page_from_freelist() for various
    full nodes and zone reclaim failures correct.  That should be
    fixed up now - notice the new goto labels zonelist_scan,
    this_zone_full, and try_next_zone, in get_page_from_freelist().

There are two reasons I persued this alternative, over some earlier
proposals that would have focused on optimizing the fake numa
emulation case by caching the last useful zone:

 1) Contrary to what I said before, we (SGI, on large ia64 sn2 systems)
    have seen real customer loads where the cost to scan the zonelist
    was a problem, due to many nodes being full of memory before
    we got to a node we could use.  Or at least, I think we have.
    This was related to me by another engineer, based on experiences
    from some time past.  So this is not guaranteed.  Most likely, though.

    The following approach should help such real numa systems just as
    much as it helps fake numa systems, or any combination thereof.

 2) The effort to distinguish fake from real numa, using node_distance,
    so that we could cache a fake numa node and optimize choosing
    it over equivalent distance fake nodes, while continuing to
    properly scan all real nodes in distance order, was going to
    require a nasty blob of zonelist and node distance munging.

    The following approach has no new dependency on node distances or
    zone sorting.

See comment in the patch below for a description of what it actually does.

Technical details of note (or controversy):

 - See the use of "zlc_active" and "did_zlc_setup" below, to delay
   adding any work for this new mechanism until we've looked at the
   first zone in zonelist.  I figured the odds of the first zone
   having the memory we needed were high enough that we should just
   look there, first, then get fancy only if we need to keep looking.

 - Some odd hackery was needed to add items to struct zonelist, while
   not tripping up the custom zonelists built by the mm/mempolicy.c
   code for MPOL_BIND.  My usual wordy comments below explain this.
   Search for "MPOL_BIND".

 - Some per-node data in the struct zonelist is now modified frequently,
   with no locking.  Multiple CPU cores on a node could hit and mangle
   this data.  The theory is that this is just performance hint data,
   and the memory allocator will work just fine despite any such mangling.
   The fields at risk are the struct 'zonelist_cache' fields 'fullzones'
   (a bitmask) and 'last_full_zap' (unsigned long jiffies).  It should
   all be self correcting after at most a one second delay.

 - This still does a linear scan of the same lengths as before.  All
   I've optimized is making the scan faster, not algorithmically
   shorter.  It is now able to scan a compact array of 'unsigned
   short' in the case of many full nodes, so one cache line should
   cover quite a few nodes, rather than each node hitting another
   one or two new and distinct cache lines.

 - If both Andi and Nick don't find this too complicated, I will be
   (pleasantly) flabbergasted.

 - I removed the comment claiming we only use one cachline's worth of
   zonelist.  We seem, at least in the fake numa case, to have put the
   lie to that claim.

 - I pay no attention to the various watermarks and such in this performance
   hint.  A node could be marked full for one watermark, and then skipped
   over when searching for a page using a different watermark.  I think
   that's actually quite ok, as it will tend to slightly increase the
   spreading of memory over other nodes, away from a memory stressed node.

===============

Performance - some benchmark results and analysis:

This benchmark runs a memory hog program that uses multiple
threads to touch alot of memory as quickly as it can.

Multiple runs were made, touching 12, 38, 64 or 90 GBytes out of
the total 96 GBytes on the system, and using 1, 19, 37, or 55
threads (on a 56 CPU system.)  System, user and real (elapsed)
timings were recorded for each run, shown in units of seconds,
in the table below.

Two kernels were tested - 2.6.18-mm3 and the same kernel with
this zonelist caching patch added.  The table also shows the
percentage improvement the zonelist caching sys time is over
(lower than) the stock *-mm kernel.

      number     2.6.18-mm3	   zonelist-cache    delta (&lt; 0 good)	percent
 GBs    N  	------------	   --------------    ----------------	systime
 mem threads   sys user  real	  sys  user  real     sys  user  real	 better
  12	 1     153   24   177	  151	 24   176      -2     0    -1	   1%
  12	19	99   22     8	   99	 22	8	0     0     0	   0%
  12	37     111   25     6	  112	 25	6	1     0     0	  -0%
  12	55     115   25     5	  110	 23	5      -5    -2     0	   4%
  38	 1     502   74   576	  497	 73   570      -5    -1    -6	   0%
  38	19     426   78    48	  373	 76    39     -53    -2    -9	  12%
  38	37     544   83    36	  547	 82    36	3    -1     0	  -0%
  38	55     501   77    23	  511	 80    24      10     3     1	  -1%
  64	 1     917  125  1042	  890	124  1014     -27    -1   -28	   2%
  64	19    1118  138   119	  965	141   103    -153     3   -16	  13%
  64	37    1202  151    94	 1136	150    81     -66    -1   -13	   5%
  64	55    1118  141    61	 1072	140    58     -46    -1    -3	   4%
  90	 1    1342  177  1519	 1275	174  1450     -67    -3   -69	   4%
  90	19    2392  199   192	 2116	189   176    -276   -10   -16	  11%
  90	37    3313  238   175	 2972	225   145    -341   -13   -30	  10%
  90	55    1948  210   104	 1843	213   100    -105     3    -4	   5%

Notes:
 1) This test ran a memory hog program that started a specified number N of
    threads, and had each thread allocate and touch 1/N'th of
    the total memory to be used in the test run in a single loop,
    writing a constant word to memory, one store every 4096 bytes.
    Watching this test during some earlier trial runs, I would see
    each of these threads sit down on one CPU and stay there, for
    the remainder of the pass, a different CPU for each thread.

 2) The 'real' column is not comparable to the 'sys' or 'user' columns.
    The 'real' column is seconds wall clock time elapsed, from beginning
    to end of that test pass.  The 'sys' and 'user' columns are total
    CPU seconds spent on that test pass.  For a 19 thread test run,
    for example, the sum of 'sys' and 'user' could be up to 19 times the
    number of 'real' elapsed wall clock seconds.

 3) Tests were run on a fresh, single-user boot, to minimize the amount
    of memory already in use at the start of the test, and to minimize
    the amount of background activity that might interfere.

 4) Tests were done on a 56 CPU, 28 Node system with 96 GBytes of RAM.

 5) Notice that the 'real' time gets large for the single thread runs, even
    though the measured 'sys' and 'user' times are modest.  I'm not sure what
    that means - probably something to do with it being slow for one thread to
    be accessing memory along ways away.  Perhaps the fake numa system, running
    ostensibly the same workload, would not show this substantial degradation
    of 'real' time for one thread on many nodes -- lets hope not.

 6) The high thread count passes (one thread per CPU - on 55 of 56 CPUs)
    ran quite efficiently, as one might expect.  Each pair of threads needed
    to allocate and touch the memory on the node the two threads shared, a
    pleasantly parallizable workload.

 7) The intermediate thread count passes, when asking for alot of memory forcing
    them to go to a few neighboring nodes, improved the most with this zonelist
    caching patch.

Conclusions:
 * This zonelist cache patch probably makes little difference one way or the
   other for most workloads on real numa hardware, if those workloads avoid
   heavy off node allocations.
 * For memory intensive workloads requiring substantial off-node allocations
   on real numa hardware, this patch improves both kernel and elapsed timings
   up to ten per-cent.
 * For fake numa systems, I'm optimistic, but will have to leave that up to
   Rohit Seth to actually test (once I get him a 2.6.18 backport.)

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Cc: Rohit Seth &lt;rohitseth@google.com&gt;
Cc: Christoph Lameter &lt;clameter@engr.sgi.com&gt;
Cc: David Rientjes &lt;rientjes@cs.washington.edu&gt;
Cc: Paul Menage &lt;menage@google.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] cpuset: top_cpuset tracks hotplug changes to node_online_map</title>
<updated>2006-09-29T16:18:21+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Jackson</name>
<email>pj@sgi.com</email>
</author>
<published>2006-09-29T09:01:16+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=38837fc75acb7fa9b0e111b0241fe4fe76c5d4b3'/>
<id>38837fc75acb7fa9b0e111b0241fe4fe76c5d4b3</id>
<content type='text'>
Change the list of memory nodes allowed to tasks in the top (root) nodeset
to dynamically track what cpus are online, using a call to a cpuset hook
from the memory hotplug code.  Make this top cpus file read-only.

On systems that have cpusets configured in their kernel, but that aren't
actively using cpusets (for some distros, this covers the majority of
systems) all tasks end up in the top cpuset.

If that system does support memory hotplug, then these tasks cannot make
use of memory nodes that are added after system boot, because the memory
nodes are not allowed in the top cpuset.  This is a surprising regression
over earlier kernels that didn't have cpusets enabled.

One key motivation for this change is to remain consistent with the
behaviour for the top_cpuset's 'cpus', which is also read-only, and which
automatically tracks the cpu_online_map.

This change also has the minor benefit that it fixes a long standing,
little noticed, minor bug in cpusets.  The cpuset performance tweak to
short circuit the cpuset_zone_allowed() check on systems with just a single
cpuset (see 'number_of_cpusets', in linux/cpuset.h) meant that simply
changing the 'mems' of the top_cpuset had no affect, even though the change
(the write system call) appeared to succeed.  With the following change,
that write to the 'mems' file fails -EACCES, and the 'mems' file stubbornly
refuses to be changed via user space writes.  Thus no one should be mislead
into thinking they've changed the top_cpusets's 'mems' when in affect they
haven't.

In order to keep the behaviour of cpusets consistent between systems
actively making use of them and systems not using them, this patch changes
the behaviour of the 'mems' file in the top (root) cpuset, making it read
only, and making it automatically track the value of node_online_map.  Thus
tasks in the top cpuset will have automatic use of hot plugged memory nodes
allowed by their cpuset.

[akpm@osdl.org: build fix]
[bunk@stusta.de: build fix]
Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk &lt;bunk@stusta.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Change the list of memory nodes allowed to tasks in the top (root) nodeset
to dynamically track what cpus are online, using a call to a cpuset hook
from the memory hotplug code.  Make this top cpus file read-only.

On systems that have cpusets configured in their kernel, but that aren't
actively using cpusets (for some distros, this covers the majority of
systems) all tasks end up in the top cpuset.

If that system does support memory hotplug, then these tasks cannot make
use of memory nodes that are added after system boot, because the memory
nodes are not allowed in the top cpuset.  This is a surprising regression
over earlier kernels that didn't have cpusets enabled.

One key motivation for this change is to remain consistent with the
behaviour for the top_cpuset's 'cpus', which is also read-only, and which
automatically tracks the cpu_online_map.

This change also has the minor benefit that it fixes a long standing,
little noticed, minor bug in cpusets.  The cpuset performance tweak to
short circuit the cpuset_zone_allowed() check on systems with just a single
cpuset (see 'number_of_cpusets', in linux/cpuset.h) meant that simply
changing the 'mems' of the top_cpuset had no affect, even though the change
(the write system call) appeared to succeed.  With the following change,
that write to the 'mems' file fails -EACCES, and the 'mems' file stubbornly
refuses to be changed via user space writes.  Thus no one should be mislead
into thinking they've changed the top_cpusets's 'mems' when in affect they
haven't.

In order to keep the behaviour of cpusets consistent between systems
actively making use of them and systems not using them, this patch changes
the behaviour of the 'mems' file in the top (root) cpuset, making it read
only, and making it automatically track the value of node_online_map.  Thus
tasks in the top cpuset will have automatic use of hot plugged memory nodes
allowed by their cpuset.

[akpm@osdl.org: build fix]
[bunk@stusta.de: build fix]
Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk &lt;bunk@stusta.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] cpuset memory spread basic implementation</title>
<updated>2006-03-24T15:33:22+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Jackson</name>
<email>pj@sgi.com</email>
</author>
<published>2006-03-24T11:16:03+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=825a46af5ac171f9f41f794a0a00165588ba1589'/>
<id>825a46af5ac171f9f41f794a0a00165588ba1589</id>
<content type='text'>
This patch provides the implementation and cpuset interface for an alternative
memory allocation policy that can be applied to certain kinds of memory
allocations, such as the page cache (file system buffers) and some slab caches
(such as inode caches).

The policy is called "memory spreading." If enabled, it spreads out these
kinds of memory allocations over all the nodes allowed to a task, instead of
preferring to place them on the node where the task is executing.

All other kinds of allocations, including anonymous pages for a tasks stack
and data regions, are not affected by this policy choice, and continue to be
allocated preferring the node local to execution, as modified by the NUMA
mempolicy.

There are two boolean flag files per cpuset that control where the kernel
allocates pages for the file system buffers and related in kernel data
structures.  They are called 'memory_spread_page' and 'memory_spread_slab'.

If the per-cpuset boolean flag file 'memory_spread_page' is set, then the
kernel will spread the file system buffers (page cache) evenly over all the
nodes that the faulting task is allowed to use, instead of preferring to put
those pages on the node where the task is running.

If the per-cpuset boolean flag file 'memory_spread_slab' is set, then the
kernel will spread some file system related slab caches, such as for inodes
and dentries evenly over all the nodes that the faulting task is allowed to
use, instead of preferring to put those pages on the node where the task is
running.

The implementation is simple.  Setting the cpuset flags 'memory_spread_page'
or 'memory_spread_cache' turns on the per-process flags PF_SPREAD_PAGE or
PF_SPREAD_SLAB, respectively, for each task that is in the cpuset or
subsequently joins that cpuset.  In subsequent patches, the page allocation
calls for the affected page cache and slab caches are modified to perform an
inline check for these flags, and if set, a call to a new routine
cpuset_mem_spread_node() returns the node to prefer for the allocation.

The cpuset_mem_spread_node() routine is also simple.  It uses the value of a
per-task rotor cpuset_mem_spread_rotor to select the next node in the current
tasks mems_allowed to prefer for the allocation.

This policy can provide substantial improvements for jobs that need to place
thread local data on the corresponding node, but that need to access large
file system data sets that need to be spread across the several nodes in the
jobs cpuset in order to fit.  Without this patch, especially for jobs that
might have one thread reading in the data set, the memory allocation across
the nodes in the jobs cpuset can become very uneven.

A couple of Copyright year ranges are updated as well.  And a couple of email
addresses that can be found in the MAINTAINERS file are removed.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
This patch provides the implementation and cpuset interface for an alternative
memory allocation policy that can be applied to certain kinds of memory
allocations, such as the page cache (file system buffers) and some slab caches
(such as inode caches).

The policy is called "memory spreading." If enabled, it spreads out these
kinds of memory allocations over all the nodes allowed to a task, instead of
preferring to place them on the node where the task is executing.

All other kinds of allocations, including anonymous pages for a tasks stack
and data regions, are not affected by this policy choice, and continue to be
allocated preferring the node local to execution, as modified by the NUMA
mempolicy.

There are two boolean flag files per cpuset that control where the kernel
allocates pages for the file system buffers and related in kernel data
structures.  They are called 'memory_spread_page' and 'memory_spread_slab'.

If the per-cpuset boolean flag file 'memory_spread_page' is set, then the
kernel will spread the file system buffers (page cache) evenly over all the
nodes that the faulting task is allowed to use, instead of preferring to put
those pages on the node where the task is running.

If the per-cpuset boolean flag file 'memory_spread_slab' is set, then the
kernel will spread some file system related slab caches, such as for inodes
and dentries evenly over all the nodes that the faulting task is allowed to
use, instead of preferring to put those pages on the node where the task is
running.

The implementation is simple.  Setting the cpuset flags 'memory_spread_page'
or 'memory_spread_cache' turns on the per-process flags PF_SPREAD_PAGE or
PF_SPREAD_SLAB, respectively, for each task that is in the cpuset or
subsequently joins that cpuset.  In subsequent patches, the page allocation
calls for the affected page cache and slab caches are modified to perform an
inline check for these flags, and if set, a call to a new routine
cpuset_mem_spread_node() returns the node to prefer for the allocation.

The cpuset_mem_spread_node() routine is also simple.  It uses the value of a
per-task rotor cpuset_mem_spread_rotor to select the next node in the current
tasks mems_allowed to prefer for the allocation.

This policy can provide substantial improvements for jobs that need to place
thread local data on the corresponding node, but that need to access large
file system data sets that need to be spread across the several nodes in the
jobs cpuset in order to fit.  Without this patch, especially for jobs that
might have one thread reading in the data set, the memory allocation across
the nodes in the jobs cpuset can become very uneven.

A couple of Copyright year ranges are updated as well.  And a couple of email
addresses that can be found in the MAINTAINERS file are removed.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] cpuset oom lock fix</title>
<updated>2006-01-15T02:27:10+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Jackson</name>
<email>pj@sgi.com</email>
</author>
<published>2006-01-14T21:21:06+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=505970b96e3b7d22177c38e03435a68376628e7a'/>
<id>505970b96e3b7d22177c38e03435a68376628e7a</id>
<content type='text'>
The problem, reported in:

  http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5859

and by various other email messages and lkml posts is that the cpuset hook
in the oom (out of memory) code can try to take a cpuset semaphore while
holding the tasklist_lock (a spinlock).

One must not sleep while holding a spinlock.

The fix seems easy enough - move the cpuset semaphore region outside the
tasklist_lock region.

This required a few lines of mechanism to implement.  The oom code where
the locking needs to be changed does not have access to the cpuset locks,
which are internal to kernel/cpuset.c only.  So I provided a couple more
cpuset interface routines, available to the rest of the kernel, which
simple take and drop the lock needed here (cpusets callback_sem).

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
The problem, reported in:

  http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5859

and by various other email messages and lkml posts is that the cpuset hook
in the oom (out of memory) code can try to take a cpuset semaphore while
holding the tasklist_lock (a spinlock).

One must not sleep while holding a spinlock.

The fix seems easy enough - move the cpuset semaphore region outside the
tasklist_lock region.

This required a few lines of mechanism to implement.  The oom code where
the locking needs to be changed does not have access to the cpuset locks,
which are internal to kernel/cpuset.c only.  So I provided a couple more
cpuset interface routines, available to the rest of the kernel, which
simple take and drop the lock needed here (cpusets callback_sem).

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] cpuset: remove test for null cpuset from alloc code path</title>
<updated>2006-01-09T04:13:44+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Jackson</name>
<email>pj@sgi.com</email>
</author>
<published>2006-01-08T09:02:01+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=c417f0242ebe578924a30d4e53d35b5059fed4e7'/>
<id>c417f0242ebe578924a30d4e53d35b5059fed4e7</id>
<content type='text'>
Remove a couple of more lines of code from the cpuset hooks in the page
allocation code path.

There was a check for a NULL cpuset pointer in the routine
cpuset_update_task_memory_state() that was only needed during system boot,
after the memory subsystem was initialized, before the cpuset subsystem was
initialized, to catch a NULL task-&gt;cpuset pointer.

Add a cpuset_init_early() routine, just before the mem_init() call in
init/main.c, that sets up just enough of the init tasks cpuset structure to
render cpuset_update_task_memory_state() calls harmless.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Remove a couple of more lines of code from the cpuset hooks in the page
allocation code path.

There was a check for a NULL cpuset pointer in the routine
cpuset_update_task_memory_state() that was only needed during system boot,
after the memory subsystem was initialized, before the cpuset subsystem was
initialized, to catch a NULL task-&gt;cpuset pointer.

Add a cpuset_init_early() routine, just before the mem_init() call in
init/main.c, that sets up just enough of the init tasks cpuset structure to
render cpuset_update_task_memory_state() calls harmless.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>[PATCH] cpuset: number_of_cpusets optimization</title>
<updated>2006-01-09T04:13:44+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Paul Jackson</name>
<email>pj@sgi.com</email>
</author>
<published>2006-01-08T09:01:57+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.toradex.cn/cgit/linux-toradex.git/commit/?id=202f72d5d1b5c2c084f63ef996c736d208b447b5'/>
<id>202f72d5d1b5c2c084f63ef996c736d208b447b5</id>
<content type='text'>
Easy little optimization hack to avoid actually having to call
cpuset_zone_allowed() and check mems_allowed, in the main page allocation
routine, __alloc_pages().  This saves several CPU cycles per page allocation
on systems not using cpusets.

A counter is updated each time a cpuset is created or removed, and whenever
there is only one cpuset in the system, it must be the root cpuset, which
contains all CPUs and all Memory Nodes.  In that case, when the counter is
one, all allocations are allowed.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Easy little optimization hack to avoid actually having to call
cpuset_zone_allowed() and check mems_allowed, in the main page allocation
routine, __alloc_pages().  This saves several CPU cycles per page allocation
on systems not using cpusets.

A counter is updated each time a cpuset is created or removed, and whenever
there is only one cpuset in the system, it must be the root cpuset, which
contains all CPUs and all Memory Nodes.  In that case, when the counter is
one, all allocations are allowed.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson &lt;pj@sgi.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@osdl.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@osdl.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
</feed>
