linux-toradex.git/include/linux/mmzone.h, branch v2.6.20.17

[PATCH] Fix sparsemem on Cell

2007-01-12T02:18:20+00:00

Fix an oops experienced on the Cell architecture when init-time functions,
early_*(), are called at runtime.  It alters the call paths to make sure
that the callers explicitly say whether the call is being made on behalf of
a hotplug even, or happening at boot-time.

It has been compile tested on ppc64, ia64, s390, i386 and x86_64.

Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann 
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Cc: Yasunori Goto 
Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky 
Acked-by: Heiko Carstens 
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt 
Cc: Paul Mackerras 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] struct seq_operations and struct file_operations constification

2006-12-07T16:39:46+00:00

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

[PATCH] memory page_alloc zonelist caching reorder structure

2006-12-07T16:39:20+00:00

Rearrange the struct members in the 'struct zonelist_cache' structure, so
as to put the readonly (once initialized) z_to_n[] array first, where it
will come right after the zones[] array in struct zonelist.

This pretty much eliminates the chance that the two frequently written
elements of 'struct zonelist_cache', the fullzones bitmap and last_full_zap
times, will end up on the same cache line as the performance sensitive,
frequently read, never (after init) written zones[] array.

Keeping frequently written data off frequently read cache lines is good for
performance.

Thanks to Rohit Seth for the suggestion.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson 
Cc: Rohit Seth 
Cc: Paul Menage 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] memory page_alloc zonelist caching speedup

2006-12-07T16:39:20+00:00

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 (< 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 
Cc: Rohit Seth 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Paul Menage 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] vmscan: Fix temp_priority race

2006-10-28T18:30:50+00:00

The temp_priority field in zone is racy, as we can walk through a reclaim
path, and just before we copy it into prev_priority, it can be overwritten
(say with DEF_PRIORITY) by another reclaimer.

The same bug is contained in both try_to_free_pages and balance_pgdat, but
it is fixed slightly differently.  In balance_pgdat, we keep a separate
priority record per zone in a local array.  In try_to_free_pages there is
no need to do this, as the priority level is the same for all zones that we
reclaim from.

Impact of this bug is that temp_priority is copied into prev_priority, and
setting this artificially high causes reclaimers to set distress
artificially low.  They then fail to reclaim mapped pages, when they are,
in fact, under severe memory pressure (their priority may be as low as 0).
This causes the OOM killer to fire incorrectly.

From: Andrew Morton 

__zone_reclaim() isn't modifying zone->prev_priority.  But zone->prev_priority
is used in the decision whether or not to bring mapped pages onto the inactive
list.  Hence there's a risk here that __zone_reclaim() will fail because
zone->prev_priority ir large (ie: low urgency) and lots of mapped pages end up
stuck on the active list.

Fix that up by decreasing (ie making more urgent) zone->prev_priority as
__zone_reclaim() scans the zone's pages.

This bug perhaps explains why ZONE_RECLAIM_PRIORITY was created.  It should be
possible to remove that now, and to just start out at DEF_PRIORITY?

Cc: Nick Piggin 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Reintroduce NODES_SPAN_OTHER_NODES for powerpc

2006-10-21T20:35:06+00:00

Reintroduce NODES_SPAN_OTHER_NODES for powerpc

Revert "[PATCH] Remove SPAN_OTHER_NODES config definition"
    This reverts commit f62859bb6871c5e4a8e591c60befc8caaf54db8c.
Revert "[PATCH] mm: remove arch independent NODES_SPAN_OTHER_NODES"
    This reverts commit a94b3ab7eab4edcc9b2cb474b188f774c331adf7.

Also update the comments to indicate that this is still required
and where its used.

Signed-off-by: Andy Whitcroft 
Cc: Paul Mackerras 
Cc: Mike Kravetz 
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt 
Acked-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Will Schmidt 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] Add node to zone for the NUMA case

2006-09-27T15:26:13+00:00

Add the node in order to optimize zone_to_nid.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Acked-by: Paul Jackson 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] own header file for struct page

2006-09-27T15:26:12+00:00

This moves the definition of struct page from mm.h to its own header file
page-struct.h.  This is a prereq to fix SetPageUptodate which is broken on
s390:

#define SetPageUptodate(_page)
       do {
               struct page *__page = (_page);
               if (!test_and_set_bit(PG_uptodate, &__page->flags))
                       page_test_and_clear_dirty(_page);
       } while (0)

_page gets used twice in this macro which can cause subtle bugs.  Using
__page for the page_test_and_clear_dirty call doesn't work since it causes
yet another problem with the page_test_and_clear_dirty macro as well.

In order to avoid all these problems caused by macros it seems to be a good
idea to get rid of them and convert them to static inline functions.
Because of header file include order it's necessary to have a seperate
header file for the struct page definition.

Cc: Martin Schwidefsky 
Signed-off-by: Heiko Carstens 
Cc: Roman Zippel 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

[PATCH] vm: add per-zone writeout counter

2006-09-27T15:26:12+00:00

The VM is supposed to minimise the number of pages which get written off the
LRU (for IO scheduling efficiency, and for high reclaim-success rates).  But
we don't actually have a clear way of showing how true this is.

So add `nr_vmscan_write' to /proc/vmstat and /proc/zoneinfo - the number of
pages which have been written by the vm scanner in this zone and globally.

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

[PATCH] Introduce mechanism for registering active regions of memory

2006-09-27T15:26:11+00:00

At a basic level, architectures define structures to record where active
ranges of page frames are located.  Once located, the code to calculate zone
sizes and holes in each architecture is very similar.  Some of this zone and
hole sizing code is difficult to read for no good reason.  This set of patches
eliminates the similar-looking architecture-specific code.

The patches introduce a mechanism where architectures register where the
active ranges of page frames are with add_active_range().  When all areas have
been discovered, free_area_init_nodes() is called to initialise the pgdat and
zones.  The zone sizes and holes are then calculated in an architecture
independent manner.

Patch 1 introduces the mechanism for registering and initialising PFN ranges
Patch 2 changes ppc to use the mechanism - 139 arch-specific LOC removed
Patch 3 changes x86 to use the mechanism - 136 arch-specific LOC removed
Patch 4 changes x86_64 to use the mechanism - 74 arch-specific LOC removed
Patch 5 changes ia64 to use the mechanism - 52 arch-specific LOC removed
Patch 6 accounts for mem_map as a memory hole as the pages are not reclaimable.
	It adjusts the watermarks slightly

Tony Luck has successfully tested for ia64 on Itanium with tiger_defconfig,
gensparse_defconfig and defconfig.  Bob Picco has also tested and debugged on
IA64.  Jack Steiner successfully boot tested on a mammoth SGI IA64-based
machine.  These were on patches against 2.6.17-rc1 and release 3 of these
patches but there have been no ia64-changes since release 3.

There are differences in the zone sizes for x86_64 as the arch-specific code
for x86_64 accounts the kernel image and the starting mem_maps as memory holes
but the architecture-independent code accounts the memory as present.

The big benefit of this set of patches is a sizable reduction of
architecture-specific code, some of which is very hairy.  There should be a
greater reduction when other architectures use the same mechanisms for zone
and hole sizing but I lack the hardware to test on.

Additional credit;
	Dave Hansen for the initial suggestion and comments on early patches
	Andy Whitcroft for reviewing early versions and catching numerous
		errors
	Tony Luck for testing and debugging on IA64
	Bob Picco for fixing bugs related to pfn registration, reviewing a
		number of patch revisions, providing a number of suggestions
		on future direction and testing heavily
	Jack Steiner and Robin Holt for testing on IA64 and clarifying
		issues related to memory holes
	Yasunori for testing on IA64
	Andi Kleen for reviewing and feeding back about x86_64
	Christian Kujau for providing valuable information related to ACPI
		problems on x86_64 and testing potential fixes

This patch:

Define the structure to represent an active range of page frames within a node
in an architecture independent manner.  Architectures are expected to register
active ranges of PFNs using add_active_range(nid, start_pfn, end_pfn) and call
free_area_init_nodes() passing the PFNs of the end of each zone.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Bob Picco 
Cc: Dave Hansen 
Cc: Andy Whitcroft 
Cc: Andi Kleen 
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt 
Cc: Paul Mackerras 
Cc: "Keith Mannthey" 
Cc: "Luck, Tony" 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: Yasunori Goto 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds