linux-toradex.git/include/linux/mmzone.h, branch v2.6.18-rc7

[PATCH] ZVC: Scale thresholds depending on the size of the system

2006-09-01T18:39:08+00:00

The ZVC counter update threshold is currently set to a fixed value of 32.
This patch sets up the threshold depending on the number of processors and
the sizes of the zones in the system.

With the current threshold of 32, I was able to observe slight contention
when more than 130-140 processors concurrently updated the counters.  The
contention vanished when I either increased the threshold to 64 or used
Andrew's idea of overstepping the interval (see ZVC overstep patch).

However, we saw contention again at 220-230 processors.  So we need higher
values for larger systems.

But the current default is already a bit of an overkill for smaller
systems.  Some systems have tiny zones where precision matters.  For
example i386 and x86_64 have 16M DMA zones and either 900M ZONE_NORMAL or
ZONE_DMA32.  These are even present on SMP and NUMA systems.

The patch here sets up a threshold based on the number of processors in the
system and the size of the zone that these counters are used for.  The
threshold should grow logarithmically, so we use fls() as an easy
approximation.

Results of tests on a system with 1024 processors (4TB RAM)

The following output is from a test allocating 1GB of memory concurrently
on each processor (Forking the process.  So contention on mmap_sem and the
pte locks is not a factor):

                       X                   MIN
TYPE:               CPUS       WALL       WALL        SYS     USER     TOTCPU
fork                   1      0.552      0.552      0.540    0.012      0.552
fork                   4      0.552      0.548      2.164    0.036      2.200
fork                  16      0.564      0.548      8.812    0.164      8.976
fork                 128      0.580      0.572     72.204    1.208     73.412
fork                 256      1.300      0.660    310.400    2.160    312.560
fork                 512      3.512      0.696   1526.836    4.816   1531.652
fork                1020     20.024      0.700  17243.176    6.688  17249.863

So a threshold of 32 is fine up to 128 processors. At 256 processors contention
becomes a factor.

Overstepping the counter (earlier patch) improves the numbers a bit:

fork                   4      0.552      0.548      2.164    0.040      2.204
fork                  16      0.552      0.548      8.640    0.148      8.788
fork                 128      0.556      0.548     69.676    0.956     70.632
fork                 256      0.876      0.636    212.468    2.108    214.576
fork                 512      2.276      0.672    997.324    4.260   1001.584
fork                1020     13.564      0.680  11586.436    6.088  11592.523

Still contention at 512 and 1020. Contention at 1020 is down by a third.
256 still has a slight bit of contention.

After this patch the counter threshold will be set to 125 which reduces
contention significantly:

fork                 128      0.560      0.548     69.776    0.932     70.708
fork                 256      0.636      0.556    143.460    2.036    145.496
fork                 512      0.640      0.548    284.244    4.236    288.480
fork                1020      1.500      0.588   1326.152    8.892   1335.044

[akpm@osdl.org: !SMP build fix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] ZVC/zone_reclaim: Leave 1% of unmapped pagecache pages for file I/O

2006-07-03T22:26:59+00:00

It turns out that it is advantageous to leave a small portion of unmapped file
backed pages if all of a zone's pages (or almost all pages) are allocated and
so the page allocator has to go off-node.

This allows recently used file I/O buffers to stay on the node and
reduces the times that zone reclaim is invoked if file I/O occurs
when we run out of memory in a zone.

The problem is that zone reclaim runs too frequently when the page cache is
used for file I/O (read write and therefore unmapped pages!) alone and we have
almost all pages of the zone allocated.  Zone reclaim may remove 32 unmapped
pages.  File I/O will use these pages for the next read/write requests and the
unmapped pages increase.  After the zone has filled up again zone reclaim will
remove it again after only 32 pages.  This cycle is too inefficient and there
are potentially too many zone reclaim cycles.

With the 1% boundary we may still remove all unmapped pages for file I/O in
zone reclaim pass.  However.  it will take a large number of read and writes
to get back to 1% again where we trigger zone reclaim again.

The zone reclaim 2.6.16/17 does not show this behavior because we have a 30
second timeout.

[akpm@osdl.org: rename the /proc file and the variable]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Use Zoned VM Counters for NUMA statistics

2006-06-30T18:25:36+00:00

The numa statistics are really event counters.  But they are per node and
so we have had special treatment for these counters through additional
fields on the pcp structure.  We can now use the per zone nature of the
zoned VM counters to realize these.

This will shrink the size of the pcp structure on NUMA systems.  We will
have some room to add additional per zone counters that will all still fit
in the same cacheline.

 Bits	Prior pcp size	  	Size after patch	We can add
 ------------------------------------------------------------------
 64	128 bytes (16 words)	80 bytes (10 words)	48
 32	 76 bytes (19 words)	56 bytes (14 words)	8 (64 byte cacheline)
							72 (128 byte)

Remove the special statistics for numa and replace them with zoned vm
counters.  This has the side effect that global sums of these events now
show up in /proc/vmstat.

Also take the opportunity to move the zone_statistics() function from
page_alloc.c into vmstat.c.

Discussions:
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115048227000002&r=1&w=2

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Acked-by: Andi Kleen 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: conversion of nr_bounce to per zone counter

2006-06-30T18:25:36+00:00

Conversion of nr_bounce to a per zone counter

nr_bounce is only used for proc output.  So it could be left as an event
counter.  However, the event counters may not be accurate and nr_bounce is
categorizing types of pages in a zone.  So we really need this to also be a
per zone counter.

[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: conversion of nr_unstable to per zone counter

2006-06-30T18:25:36+00:00

Conversion of nr_unstable to a per zone counter

We need to do some special modifications to the nfs code since there are
multiple cases of disposition and we need to have a page ref for proper
accounting.

This converts the last critical page state of the VM and therefore we need to
remove several functions that were depending on GET_PAGE_STATE_LAST in order
to make the kernel compile again.  We are only left with event type counters
in page state.

[akpm@osdl.org: bugfixes]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Trond Myklebust 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: conversion of nr_writeback to per zone counter

2006-06-30T18:25:35+00:00

Conversion of nr_writeback to per zone counter.

This removes the last page_state counter from arch/i386/mm/pgtable.c so we
drop the page_state from there.

[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Trond Myklebust 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: conversion of nr_dirty to per zone counter

2006-06-30T18:25:35+00:00

This makes nr_dirty a per zone counter.  Looping over all processors is
avoided during writeback state determination.

The counter aggregation for nr_dirty had to be undone in the NFS layer since
we summed up the page counts from multiple zones.  Someone more familiar with
NFS should probably review what I have done.

[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Trond Myklebust 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: conversion of nr_pagetables to per zone counter

2006-06-30T18:25:35+00:00

Conversion of nr_page_table_pages to a per zone counter

[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: conversion of nr_slab to per zone counter

2006-06-30T18:25:35+00:00

- Allows reclaim to access counter without looping over processor counts.

- Allows accurate statistics on how many pages are used in a zone by
  the slab. This may become useful to balance slab allocations over
  various zones.

[akpm@osdl.org: bugfix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] zoned vm counters: zone_reclaim: remove /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_interval

2006-06-30T18:25:35+00:00

The zone_reclaim_interval was necessary because we were not able to determine
how many unmapped pages exist in a zone.  Therefore we had to scan in
intervals to figure out if any pages were unmapped.

With the zoned counters and NR_ANON_PAGES we now know the number of pagecache
pages and the number of mapped pages in a zone.  So we can simply skip the
reclaim if there is an insufficient number of unmapped pages.  We use
SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX as the boundary.

Drop all support for /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_interval.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds