linux-stable.git/include/linux/mm_types.h, branch v3.6.3

mm: introduce __GFP_MEMALLOC to allow access to emergency reserves

2012-08-01T01:42:45+00:00

__GFP_MEMALLOC will allow the allocation to disregard the watermarks, much
like PF_MEMALLOC.  It allows one to pass along the memalloc state in
object related allocation flags as opposed to task related flags, such as
sk->sk_allocation.  This removes the need for ALLOC_PFMEMALLOC as callers
using __GFP_MEMALLOC can get the ALLOC_NO_WATERMARK flag which is now
enough to identify allocations related to page reclaim.

Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra 
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: David Miller 
Cc: Neil Brown 
Cc: Mike Christie 
Cc: Eric B Munson 
Cc: Eric Dumazet 
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: sl[au]b: add knowledge of PFMEMALLOC reserve pages

2012-08-01T01:42:45+00:00

When a user or administrator requires swap for their application, they
create a swap partition and file, format it with mkswap and activate it
with swapon.  Swap over the network is considered as an option in diskless
systems.  The two likely scenarios are when blade servers are used as part
of a cluster where the form factor or maintenance costs do not allow the
use of disks and thin clients.

The Linux Terminal Server Project recommends the use of the Network Block
Device (NBD) for swap according to the manual at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ltsp/files/Docs-Admin-Guide/LTSPManual.pdf/download
There is also documentation and tutorials on how to setup swap over NBD at
places like https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/EnableNBDSWAP The
nbd-client also documents the use of NBD as swap.  Despite this, the fact
is that a machine using NBD for swap can deadlock within minutes if swap
is used intensively.  This patch series addresses the problem.

The core issue is that network block devices do not use mempools like
normal block devices do.  As the host cannot control where they receive
packets from, they cannot reliably work out in advance how much memory
they might need.  Some years ago, Peter Zijlstra developed a series of
patches that supported swap over an NFS that at least one distribution is
carrying within their kernels.  This patch series borrows very heavily
from Peter's work to support swapping over NBD as a pre-requisite to
supporting swap-over-NFS.  The bulk of the complexity is concerned with
preserving memory that is allocated from the PFMEMALLOC reserves for use
by the network layer which is needed for both NBD and NFS.

Patch 1 adds knowledge of the PFMEMALLOC reserves to SLAB and SLUB to
	preserve access to pages allocated under low memory situations
	to callers that are freeing memory.

Patch 2 optimises the SLUB fast path to avoid pfmemalloc checks

Patch 3 introduces __GFP_MEMALLOC to allow access to the PFMEMALLOC
	reserves without setting PFMEMALLOC.

Patch 4 opens the possibility for softirqs to use PFMEMALLOC reserves
	for later use by network packet processing.

Patch 5 only sets page->pfmemalloc when ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS was required

Patch 6 ignores memory policies when ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS is set.

Patches 7-12 allows network processing to use PFMEMALLOC reserves when
	the socket has been marked as being used by the VM to clean pages. If
	packets are received and stored in pages that were allocated under
	low-memory situations and are unrelated to the VM, the packets
	are dropped.

	Patch 11 reintroduces __skb_alloc_page which the networking
	folk may object to but is needed in some cases to propogate
	pfmemalloc from a newly allocated page to an skb. If there is a
	strong objection, this patch can be dropped with the impact being
	that swap-over-network will be slower in some cases but it should
	not fail.

Patch 13 is a micro-optimisation to avoid a function call in the
	common case.

Patch 14 tags NBD sockets as being SOCK_MEMALLOC so they can use
	PFMEMALLOC if necessary.

Patch 15 notes that it is still possible for the PFMEMALLOC reserve
	to be depleted. To prevent this, direct reclaimers get throttled on
	a waitqueue if 50% of the PFMEMALLOC reserves are depleted.  It is
	expected that kswapd and the direct reclaimers already running
	will clean enough pages for the low watermark to be reached and
	the throttled processes are woken up.

Patch 16 adds a statistic to track how often processes get throttled

Some basic performance testing was run using kernel builds, netperf on
loopback for UDP and TCP, hackbench (pipes and sockets), iozone and
sysbench.  Each of them were expected to use the sl*b allocators
reasonably heavily but there did not appear to be significant performance
variances.

For testing swap-over-NBD, a machine was booted with 2G of RAM with a
swapfile backed by NBD.  8*NUM_CPU processes were started that create
anonymous memory mappings and read them linearly in a loop.  The total
size of the mappings were 4*PHYSICAL_MEMORY to use swap heavily under
memory pressure.

Without the patches and using SLUB, the machine locks up within minutes
and runs to completion with them applied.  With SLAB, the story is
different as an unpatched kernel run to completion.  However, the patched
kernel completed the test 45% faster.

MICRO
                                         3.5.0-rc2 3.5.0-rc2
					 vanilla     swapnbd
Unrecognised test vmscan-anon-mmap-write
MMTests Statistics: duration
Sys Time Running Test (seconds)             197.80    173.07
User+Sys Time Running Test (seconds)        206.96    182.03
Total Elapsed Time (seconds)               3240.70   1762.09

This patch: mm: sl[au]b: add knowledge of PFMEMALLOC reserve pages

Allocations of pages below the min watermark run a risk of the machine
hanging due to a lack of memory.  To prevent this, only callers who have
PF_MEMALLOC or TIF_MEMDIE set and are not processing an interrupt are
allowed to allocate with ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS.  Once they are allocated to
a slab though, nothing prevents other callers consuming free objects
within those slabs.  This patch limits access to slab pages that were
alloced from the PFMEMALLOC reserves.

When this patch is applied, pages allocated from below the low watermark
are returned with page->pfmemalloc set and it is up to the caller to
determine how the page should be protected.  SLAB restricts access to any
page with page->pfmemalloc set to callers which are known to able to
access the PFMEMALLOC reserve.  If one is not available, an attempt is
made to allocate a new page rather than use a reserve.  SLUB is a bit more
relaxed in that it only records if the current per-CPU page was allocated
from PFMEMALLOC reserve and uses another partial slab if the caller does
not have the necessary GFP or process flags.  This was found to be
sufficient in tests to avoid hangs due to SLUB generally maintaining
smaller lists than SLAB.

In low-memory conditions it does mean that !PFMEMALLOC allocators can fail
a slab allocation even though free objects are available because they are
being preserved for callers that are freeing pages.

[a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl: Original implementation]
[sebastian@breakpoint.cc: Correct order of page flag clearing]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: David Miller 
Cc: Neil Brown 
Cc: Peter Zijlstra 
Cc: Mike Christie 
Cc: Eric B Munson 
Cc: Eric Dumazet 
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge branch 'slab/next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/penberg/linux

2012-07-30T18:32:24+00:00

Pull SLAB changes from Pekka Enberg:
 "Most of the changes included are from Christoph Lameter's "common
  slab" patch series that unifies common parts of SLUB, SLAB, and SLOB
  allocators.  The unification is needed for Glauber Costa's "kmem
  memcg" work that will hopefully appear for v3.7.

  The rest of the changes are fixes and speedups by various people."

* 'slab/next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/penberg/linux: (32 commits)
  mm: Fix build warning in kmem_cache_create()
  slob: Fix early boot kernel crash
  mm, slub: ensure irqs are enabled for kmemcheck
  mm, sl[aou]b: Move kmem_cache_create mutex handling to common code
  mm, sl[aou]b: Use a common mutex definition
  mm, sl[aou]b: Common definition for boot state of the slab allocators
  mm, sl[aou]b: Extract common code for kmem_cache_create()
  slub: remove invalid reference to list iterator variable
  mm: Fix signal SIGFPE in slabinfo.c.
  slab: move FULL state transition to an initcall
  slab: Fix a typo in commit 8c138b "slab: Get rid of obj_size macro"
  mm, slab: Build fix for recent kmem_cache changes
  slab: rename gfpflags to allocflags
  slub: refactoring unfreeze_partials()
  slub: use __cmpxchg_double_slab() at interrupt disabled place
  slab/mempolicy: always use local policy from interrupt context
  slab: Get rid of obj_size macro
  mm, sl[aou]b: Extract common fields from struct kmem_cache
  slab: Remove some accessors
  slab: Use page struct fields instead of casting
  ...

mm: fix slab->page _count corruption when using slub

2012-06-20T21:39:35+00:00

On arches that do not support this_cpu_cmpxchg_double() slab_lock is used
to do atomic cmpxchg() on double word which contains page->_count.  The
page count can be changed from get_page() or put_page() without taking
slab_lock.  That corrupts page counter.

Fix it by moving page->_count out of cmpxchg_double data.  So that slub
does no change it while updating slub meta-data in struct page.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: use standard comment layout, tweak comment text]
Reported-by: Amey Bhide 
Signed-off-by: Pravin B Shelar 
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Pekka Enberg 
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

slab: Use page struct fields instead of casting

2012-06-14T06:19:56+00:00

Add fields to the page struct so that it is properly documented that
slab overlays the lru fields.

This cleans up some casts in slab.

Reviewed-by: Glauber Costa 
Reviewed-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg

slob: Define page struct fields used in mm_types.h

2012-06-14T06:19:47+00:00

Define the fields used by slob in mm_types.h and use struct page instead
of struct slob_page in slob. This cleans up numerous of typecasts in slob.c and
makes readers aware of slob's use of page struct fields.

[Also cleans up some bitrot in slob.c. The page struct field layout
in slob.c is an old layout and does not match the one in mm_types.h]

Reviewed-by: Glauber Costa 
Acked-by: David Rientjes 
Reviewed-by: Joonsoo Kim 
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg

mm: remove swap token code

2012-05-29T23:22:19+00:00

The swap token code no longer fits in with the current VM model.  It
does not play well with cgroups or the better NUMA placement code in
development, since we have only one swap token globally.

It also has the potential to mess with scalability of the system, by
increasing the number of non-reclaimable pages on the active and
inactive anon LRU lists.

Last but not least, the swap token code has been broken for a year
without complaints, as reported by Konstantin Khlebnikov.  This suggests
we no longer have much use for it.

The days of sub-1G memory systems with heavy use of swap are over.  If
we ever need thrashing reducing code in the future, we will have to
implement something that does scale.

Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Acked-by: Bob Picco 
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

uprobes/core: Allocate XOL slots for uprobes use

2012-03-31T09:50:01+00:00

Uprobes executes the original instruction at a probed location
out of line. For this, we allocate a page (per mm) upon the
first uprobe hit, in the process user address space, divide it
into slots that are used to store the actual instructions to be
singlestepped. These slots are known as xol (execution out of
line) slots.

Care is taken to ensure that the allocation is in an unmapped
area as close to the top of the user address space as possible,
with appropriate permission settings to keep selinux like
frameworks happy.

Upon a uprobe hit, a free slot is acquired, and is released
after the singlestep completes.

Lots of improvements courtesy suggestions/inputs from Peter and
Oleg.

[ Folded a fix for build issue on powerpc fixed and reported by
  Stephen Rothwell. ]

Signed-off-by: Srikar Dronamraju 
Cc: Linus Torvalds 
Cc: Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli 
Cc: Jim Keniston 
Cc: Linux-mm 
Cc: Oleg Nesterov 
Cc: Andi Kleen 
Cc: Christoph Hellwig 
Cc: Steven Rostedt 
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo 
Cc: Masami Hiramatsu 
Cc: Anton Arapov 
Cc: Peter Zijlstra 
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20120330182631.10018.48175.sendpatchset@srdronam.in.ibm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

mm,slub,x86: decouple size of struct page from CONFIG_CMPXCHG_LOCAL

2012-01-13T04:13:03+00:00

While implementing cmpxchg_double() on s390 I realized that we don't set
CONFIG_CMPXCHG_LOCAL despite the fact that we have support for it.

However setting that option will increase the size of struct page by
eight bytes on 64 bit, which we certainly do not want.  Also, it doesn't
make sense that a present cpu feature should increase the size of struct
page.

Besides that it looks like the dependency to CMPXCHG_LOCAL is wrong and
that it should depend on CMPXCHG_DOUBLE instead.

This patch:

If an architecture supports CMPXCHG_LOCAL this shouldn't result
automatically in larger struct pages if the SLUB allocator is used.
Instead introduce a new config option "HAVE_ALIGNED_STRUCT_PAGE" which
can be selected if a double word aligned struct page is required.  Also
update x86 Kconfig so that it should work as before.

Signed-off-by: Heiko Carstens 
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Pekka Enberg 
Cc: Ingo Molnar 
Cc: Thomas Gleixner 
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: thp: tail page refcounting fix

2011-11-02T23:06:57+00:00

Michel while working on the working set estimation code, noticed that
calling get_page_unless_zero() on a random pfn_to_page(random_pfn)
wasn't safe, if the pfn ended up being a tail page of a transparent
hugepage under splitting by __split_huge_page_refcount().

He then found the problem could also theoretically materialize with
page_cache_get_speculative() during the speculative radix tree lookups
that uses get_page_unless_zero() in SMP if the radix tree page is freed
and reallocated and get_user_pages is called on it before
page_cache_get_speculative has a chance to call get_page_unless_zero().

So the best way to fix the problem is to keep page_tail->_count zero at
all times.  This will guarantee that get_page_unless_zero() can never
succeed on any tail page.  page_tail->_mapcount is guaranteed zero and
is unused for all tail pages of a compound page, so we can simply
account the tail page references there and transfer them to
tail_page->_count in __split_huge_page_refcount() (in addition to the
head_page->_mapcount).

While debugging this s/_count/_mapcount/ change I also noticed get_page is
called by direct-io.c on pages returned by get_user_pages.  That wasn't
entirely safe because the two atomic_inc in get_page weren't atomic.  As
opposed to other get_user_page users like secondary-MMU page fault to
establish the shadow pagetables would never call any superflous get_page
after get_user_page returns.  It's safer to make get_page universally safe
for tail pages and to use get_page_foll() within follow_page (inside
get_user_pages()).  get_page_foll() is safe to do the refcounting for tail
pages without taking any locks because it is run within PT lock protected
critical sections (PT lock for pte and page_table_lock for
pmd_trans_huge).

The standard get_page() as invoked by direct-io instead will now take
the compound_lock but still only for tail pages.  The direct-io paths
are usually I/O bound and the compound_lock is per THP so very
finegrined, so there's no risk of scalability issues with it.  A simple
direct-io benchmarks with all lockdep prove locking and spinlock
debugging infrastructure enabled shows identical performance and no
overhead.  So it's worth it.  Ideally direct-io should stop calling
get_page() on pages returned by get_user_pages().  The spinlock in
get_page() is already optimized away for no-THP builds but doing
get_page() on tail pages returned by GUP is generally a rare operation
and usually only run in I/O paths.

This new refcounting on page_tail->_mapcount in addition to avoiding new
RCU critical sections will also allow the working set estimation code to
work without any further complexity associated to the tail page
refcounting with THP.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli 
Reported-by: Michel Lespinasse 
Reviewed-by: Michel Lespinasse 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Peter Zijlstra 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt 
Cc: David Gibson 
Cc: 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds