linux-toradex.git/mm/vmstat.c, branch v3.18.4

vmstat: on-demand vmstat workers V8

2014-10-10T02:26:02+00:00

vmstat workers are used for folding counter differentials into the zone,
per node and global counters at certain time intervals.  They currently
run at defined intervals on all processors which will cause some holdoff
for processors that need minimal intrusion by the OS.

The current vmstat_update mechanism depends on a deferrable timer firing
every other second by default which registers a work queue item that runs
on the local CPU, with the result that we have 1 interrupt and one
additional schedulable task on each CPU every 2 seconds If a workload
indeed causes VM activity or multiple tasks are running on a CPU, then
there are probably bigger issues to deal with.

However, some workloads dedicate a CPU for a single CPU bound task.  This
is done in high performance computing, in high frequency financial
applications, in networking (Intel DPDK, EZchip NPS) and with the advent
of systems with more and more CPUs over time, this may become more and
more common to do since when one has enough CPUs one cares less about
efficiently sharing a CPU with other tasks and more about efficiently
monopolizing a CPU per task.

The difference of having this timer firing and workqueue kernel thread
scheduled per second can be enormous.  An artificial test measuring the
worst case time to do a simple "i++" in an endless loop on a bare metal
system and under Linux on an isolated CPU with dynticks and with and
without this patch, have Linux match the bare metal performance (~700
cycles) with this patch and loose by couple of orders of magnitude (~200k
cycles) without it[*].  The loss occurs for something that just calculates
statistics.  For networking applications, for example, this could be the
difference between dropping packets or sustaining line rate.

Statistics are important and useful, but it would be great if there would
be a way to not cause statistics gathering produce a huge performance
difference.  This patche does just that.

This patch creates a vmstat shepherd worker that monitors the per cpu
differentials on all processors.  If there are differentials on a
processor then a vmstat worker local to the processors with the
differentials is created.  That worker will then start folding the diffs
in regular intervals.  Should the worker find that there is no work to be
done then it will make the shepherd worker monitor the differentials
again.

With this patch it is possible then to have periods longer than
2 seconds without any OS event on a "cpu" (hardware thread).

The patch shows a very minor increased in system performance.

hackbench -s 512 -l 2000 -g 15 -f 25 -P

Results before the patch:

Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.992
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.971
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 5.063

Hackbench after the patch:

Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.973
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.990
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.993

[fengguang.wu@intel.com: cpu_stat_off can be static]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Reviewed-by: Gilad Ben-Yossef 
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker 
Cc: Thomas Gleixner 
Cc: Tejun Heo 
Cc: John Stultz 
Cc: Mike Frysinger 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Hakan Akkan 
Cc: Max Krasnyansky 
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: Viresh Kumar 
Cc: H. Peter Anvin 
Cc: Ingo Molnar 
Cc: Peter Zijlstra 
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/balloon_compaction: add vmstat counters and kpageflags bit

2014-10-10T02:26:01+00:00

Always mark pages with PageBalloon even if balloon compaction is disabled
and expose this mark in /proc/kpageflags as KPF_BALLOON.

Also this patch adds three counters into /proc/vmstat: "balloon_inflate",
"balloon_deflate" and "balloon_migrate".  They accumulate balloon
activity.  Current size of balloon is (balloon_inflate - balloon_deflate)
pages.

All generic balloon code now gathered under option CONFIG_MEMORY_BALLOON.
It should be selected by ballooning driver which wants use this feature.
Currently virtio-balloon is the only user.

Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov 
Cc: Rafael Aquini 
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: vmscan: only update per-cpu thresholds for online CPU

2014-08-07T01:01:20+00:00

When kswapd is awake reclaiming, the per-cpu stat thresholds are lowered
to get more accurate counts to avoid breaching watermarks.  This
threshold update iterates over all possible CPUs which is unnecessary.
Only online CPUs need to be updated.  If a new CPU is onlined,
refresh_zone_stat_thresholds() will set the thresholds correctly.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: move zone->pages_scanned into a vmstat counter

2014-08-07T01:01:20+00:00

zone->pages_scanned is a write-intensive cache line during page reclaim
and it's also updated during page free.  Move the counter into vmstat to
take advantage of the per-cpu updates and do not update it in the free
paths unless necessary.

On a small UMA machine running tiobench the difference is marginal.  On
a 4-node machine the overhead is more noticable.  Note that automatic
NUMA balancing was disabled for this test as otherwise the system CPU
overhead is unpredictable.

          3.16.0-rc3  3.16.0-rc3  3.16.0-rc3
             vanillarearrange-v5   vmstat-v5
User          746.94      759.78      774.56
System      65336.22    58350.98    32847.27
Elapsed     27553.52    27282.02    27415.04

Note that the overhead reduction will vary depending on where exactly
pages are allocated and freed.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: rearrange zone fields into read-only, page alloc, statistics and page reclaim lines

2014-08-07T01:01:20+00:00

The arrangement of struct zone has changed over time and now it has
reached the point where there is some inappropriate sharing going on.
On x86-64 for example

o The zone->node field is shared with the zone lock and zone->node is
  accessed frequently from the page allocator due to the fair zone
  allocation policy.

o span_seqlock is almost never used by shares a line with free_area

o Some zone statistics share a cache line with the LRU lock so
  reclaim-intensive and allocator-intensive workloads can bounce the cache
  line on a stat update

This patch rearranges struct zone to put read-only and read-mostly
fields together and then splits the page allocator intensive fields, the
zone statistics and the page reclaim intensive fields into their own
cache lines.  Note that the type of lowmem_reserve changes due to the
watermark calculations being signed and avoiding a signed/unsigned
conversion there.

On the test configuration I used the overall size of struct zone shrunk
by one cache line.  On smaller machines, this is not likely to be
noticable.  However, on a 4-node NUMA machine running tiobench the
system CPU overhead is reduced by this patch.

          3.16.0-rc3  3.16.0-rc3
             vanillarearrange-v5r9
User          746.94      759.78
System      65336.22    58350.98
Elapsed     27553.52    27282.02

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: use the light version __mod_zone_page_state in mlocked_vma_newpage()

2014-06-04T23:54:07+00:00

mlocked_vma_newpage() is called with pte lock held(a spinlock), which
implies preemtion disabled, and the vm stat counter is not modified from
interrupt context, so we need not use an irq-safe mod_zone_page_state()
here, using a light-weight version __mod_zone_page_state() would be OK.

This patch also documents __mod_zone_page_state() and some of its
callsites.  The comment above __mod_zone_page_state() is from Hugh
Dickins, and acked by Christoph.

Most credits to Hugh and Christoph for the clarification on the usage of
the __mod_zone_page_state().

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Suggested-by: Andrew Morton 
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins 
Signed-off-by: Jianyu Zhan 
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: replace __get_cpu_var uses with this_cpu_ptr

2014-06-04T23:54:03+00:00

Replace places where __get_cpu_var() is used for an address calculation
with this_cpu_ptr().

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Tejun Heo 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm,vmacache: add debug data

2014-06-04T23:53:57+00:00

Introduce a CONFIG_DEBUG_VM_VMACACHE option to enable counting the cache
hit rate -- exported in /proc/vmstat.

Any updates to the caching scheme needs this kind of data, thus it can
save some work re-implementing the counting all the time.

Signed-off-by: Davidlohr Bueso 
Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge tag 'cpu-hotplug-3.15-rc1' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/linux-pm

2014-04-07T21:55:46+00:00

Pull CPU hotplug notifiers registration fixes from Rafael Wysocki:
 "The purpose of this single series of commits from Srivatsa S Bhat
  (with a small piece from Gautham R Shenoy) touching multiple
  subsystems that use CPU hotplug notifiers is to provide a way to
  register them that will not lead to deadlocks with CPU online/offline
  operations as described in the changelog of commit 93ae4f978ca7f ("CPU
  hotplug: Provide lockless versions of callback registration
  functions").

  The first three commits in the series introduce the API and document
  it and the rest simply goes through the users of CPU hotplug notifiers
  and converts them to using the new method"

* tag 'cpu-hotplug-3.15-rc1' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/linux-pm: (52 commits)
  net/iucv/iucv.c: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  net/core/flow.c: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  mm, zswap: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  mm, vmstat: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  profile: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  trace, ring-buffer: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  xen, balloon: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  hwmon, via-cputemp: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  hwmon, coretemp: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  thermal, x86-pkg-temp: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  octeon, watchdog: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  oprofile, nmi-timer: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  intel-idle: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  clocksource, dummy-timer: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  drivers/base/topology.c: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  acpi-cpufreq: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  zsmalloc: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  scsi, fcoe: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  scsi, bnx2fc: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  scsi, bnx2i: Fix CPU hotplug callback registration
  ...

drop_caches: add some documentation and info message

2014-04-03T23:21:04+00:00

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and a load of blog posts
suggesting that using "drop_caches" periodically keeps your system
running in "tip top shape".  Perhaps adding some kernel documentation
will increase the amount of accurate data on its use.

If we are not shrinking caches effectively, then we have real bugs.
Using drop_caches will simply mask the bugs and make them harder to
find, but certainly does not fix them, nor is it an appropriate
"workaround" to limit the size of the caches.  On the contrary, there
have been bug reports on issues that turned out to be misguided use of
cache dropping.

Dropping caches is a very drastic and disruptive operation that is good
for debugging and running tests, but if it creates bug reports from
production use, kernel developers should be aware of its use.

Add a bit more documentation about it, a syslog message to track down
abusers, and vmstat drop counters to help analyze problem reports.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: checkpatch fixes]
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: add runtime suppression control]
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko 
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds