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>
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>
Conversion of nr_page_table_pages to 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>
- 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 <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The current NR_FILE_MAPPED is used by zone reclaim and the dirty load
calculation as the number of mapped pagecache pages. However, that is not
true. NR_FILE_MAPPED includes the mapped anonymous pages. This patch
separates those and therefore allows an accurate tracking of the anonymous
pages per zone.
It then becomes possible to determine the number of unmapped pages per zone
and we can avoid scanning for unmapped pages if there are none.
Also it may now be possible to determine the mapped/unmapped ratio in
get_dirty_limit. Isnt the number of anonymous pages irrelevant in that
calculation?
Note that this will change the meaning of the number of mapped pages reported
in /proc/vmstat /proc/meminfo and in the per node statistics. This may affect
user space tools that monitor these counters! NR_FILE_MAPPED works like
NR_FILE_DIRTY. It is only valid for pagecache pages.
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>
Currently a single atomic variable is used to establish the size of the page
cache in the whole machine. The zoned VM counters have the same method of
implementation as the nr_pagecache code but also allow the determination of
the pagecache size per zone.
Remove the special implementation for nr_pagecache and make it a zoned counter
named NR_FILE_PAGES.
Updates of the page cache counters are always performed with interrupts off.
We can therefore use the __ variant here.
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>
nr_mapped is important because it allows a determination of how many pages of
a zone are not mapped, which would allow a more efficient means of determining
when we need to reclaim memory in a zone.
We take the nr_mapped field out of the page state structure and define a new
per zone counter named NR_FILE_MAPPED (the anonymous pages will be split off
from NR_MAPPED in the next patch).
We replace the use of nr_mapped in various kernel locations. This avoids the
looping over all processors in try_to_free_pages(), writeback, reclaim (swap +
zone reclaim).
[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>
Per zone counter infrastructure
The counters that we currently have for the VM are split per processor. The
processor however has not much to do with the zone these pages belong to. We
cannot tell f.e. how many ZONE_DMA pages are dirty.
So we are blind to potentially inbalances in the usage of memory in various
zones. F.e. in a NUMA system we cannot tell how many pages are dirty on a
particular node. If we knew then we could put measures into the VM to balance
the use of memory between different zones and different nodes in a NUMA
system. For example it would be possible to limit the dirty pages per node so
that fast local memory is kept available even if a process is dirtying huge
amounts of pages.
Another example is zone reclaim. We do not know how many unmapped pages exist
per zone. So we just have to try to reclaim. If it is not working then we
pause and try again later. It would be better if we knew when it makes sense
to reclaim unmapped pages from a zone. This patchset allows the determination
of the number of unmapped pages per zone. We can remove the zone reclaim
interval with the counters introduced here.
Futhermore the ability to have various usage statistics available will allow
the development of new NUMA balancing algorithms that may be able to improve
the decision making in the scheduler of when to move a process to another node
and hopefully will also enable automatic page migration through a user space
program that can analyse the memory load distribution and then rebalance
memory use in order to increase performance.
The counter framework here implements differential counters for each processor
in struct zone. The differential counters are consolidated when a threshold
is exceeded (like done in the current implementation for nr_pageache), when
slab reaping occurs or when a consolidation function is called.
Consolidation uses atomic operations and accumulates counters per zone in the
zone structure and also globally in the vm_stat array. VM functions can
access the counts by simply indexing a global or zone specific array.
The arrangement of counters in an array also simplifies processing when output
has to be generated for /proc/*.
Counters can be updated by calling inc/dec_zone_page_state or
_inc/dec_zone_page_state analogous to *_page_state. The second group of
functions can be called if it is known that interrupts are disabled.
Special optimized increment and decrement functions are provided. These can
avoid certain checks and use increment or decrement instructions that an
architecture may provide.
We also add a new CONFIG_DMA_IS_NORMAL that signifies that an architecture can
do DMA to all memory and therefore ZONE_NORMAL will not be populated. This is
only currently set for IA64 SGI SN2 and currently only affects
node_page_state(). In the best case node_page_state can be reduced to
retrieving a single counter for the one zone on the node.
[akpm@osdl.org: cleanups]
[akpm@osdl.org: export vm_stat[] for filesystems]
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>
NOTE: ZVC are *not* the lightweight event counters. ZVCs are reliable whereas
event counters do not need to be.
Zone based VM statistics are necessary to be able to determine what the state
of memory in one zone is. In a NUMA system this can be helpful for local
reclaim and other memory optimizations that may be able to shift VM load in
order to get more balanced memory use.
It is also useful to know how the computing load affects the memory
allocations on various zones. This patchset allows the retrieval of that data
from userspace.
The patchset introduces a framework for counters that is a cross between the
existing page_stats --which are simply global counters split per cpu-- and the
approach of deferred incremental updates implemented for nr_pagecache.
Small per cpu 8 bit counters are added to struct zone. If the counter exceeds
certain thresholds then the counters are accumulated in an array of
atomic_long in the zone and in a global array that sums up all zone values.
The small 8 bit counters are next to the per cpu page pointers and so they
will be in high in the cpu cache when pages are allocated and freed.
Access to VM counter information for a zone and for the whole machine is then
possible by simply indexing an array (Thanks to Nick Piggin for pointing out
that approach). The access to the total number of pages of various types does
no longer require the summing up of all per cpu counters.
Benefits of this patchset right now:
- Ability for UP and SMP configuration to determine how memory
is balanced between the DMA, NORMAL and HIGHMEM zones.
- loops over all processors are avoided in writeback and
reclaim paths. We can avoid caching the writeback information
because the needed information is directly accessible.
- Special handling for nr_pagecache removed.
- zone_reclaim_interval vanishes since VM stats can now determine
when it is worth to do local reclaim.
- Fast inline per node page state determination.
- Accurate counters in /sys/devices/system/node/node*/meminfo. Current
counters are counting simply which processor allocated a page somewhere
and guestimate based on that. So the counters were not useful to show
the actual distribution of page use on a specific zone.
- The swap_prefetch patch requires per node statistics in order to
figure out when processors of a node can prefetch. This patch provides
some of the needed numbers.
- Detailed VM counters available in more /proc and /sys status files.
References to earlier discussions:
V1 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113511649910826&w=2
V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114980851924230&w=2
V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115014697910351&w=2
V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767318740&w=2
Performance tests with AIM7 did not show any regressions. Seems to be a tad
faster even. Tested on ia64/NUMA. Builds fine on i386, SMP / UP. Includes
fixes for s390/arm/uml arch code.
This patch:
Move counter code from page_alloc.c/page-flags.h to vmstat.c/h.
Create vmstat.c/vmstat.h by separating the counter code and the proc
functions.
Move the vm_stat_text array before zoneinfo_show.
[akpm@osdl.org: s390 build fix]
[akpm@osdl.org: HOTPLUG_CPU build fix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.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>
