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 <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Increments and decrements are usually grouped rather than mixed. We can optimize the inc and dec functions for that case. Increment and decrement the counters by 50% more than the threshold in those cases and set the differential accordingly. This decreases the need to update the atomic counters. The idea came originally from Andrew Morton. The overstepping alone was sufficient to address the contention issue found when updating the global and the per zone counters from 160 processors. Also remove some code in dec_zone_page_state. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Add missing EXPORT_SYMBOL for all_vm_events(). Git commit f8891e5e1f93a128c3900f82035e8541357896a7 caused this: Building modules, stage 2. MODPOST WARNING: "all_vm_events" [arch/s390/appldata/appldata_mem.ko] undefined! CC arch/s390/appldata/appldata_mem.mod.o Cc: Christoph Lameter <christoph@lameter.com> Cc: Gerald Schaefer <geraldsc@de.ibm.com> Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The remaining counters in page_state after the zoned VM counter patches have been applied are all just for show in /proc/vmstat. They have no essential function for the VM. We use a simple increment of per cpu variables. In order to avoid the most severe races we disable preempt. Preempt does not prevent the race between an increment and an interrupt handler incrementing the same statistics counter. However, that race is exceedingly rare, we may only loose one increment or so and there is no requirement (at least not in kernel) that the vm event counters have to be accurate. In the non preempt case this results in a simple increment for each counter. For many architectures this will be reduced by the compiler to a single instruction. This single instruction is atomic for i386 and x86_64. And therefore even the rare race condition in an interrupt is avoided for both architectures in most cases. The patchset also adds an off switch for embedded systems that allows a building of linux kernels without these counters. The implementation of these counters is through inline code that hopefully results in only a single instruction increment instruction being emitted (i386, x86_64) or in the increment being hidden though instruction concurrency (EPIC architectures such as ia64 can get that done). Benefits: - VM event counter operations usually reduce to a single inline instruction on i386 and x86_64. - No interrupt disable, only preempt disable for the preempt case. Preempt disable can also be avoided by moving the counter into a spinlock. - Handling is similar to zoned VM counters. - Simple and easily extendable. - Can be omitted to reduce memory use for embedded use. References: RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113512330605497&w=2 RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114988082814934&w=2 local_t http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114991748606690&w=2 V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115014808400007&r=1&w=2 V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767022346&w=2 V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115047968808926&w=2 Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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 <clameter@sgi.com> Acked-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
No callers. Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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 <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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 <clameter@sgi.com> Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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 <clameter@sgi.com> Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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 <clameter@sgi.com> Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>