linux-stable.git/include/linux/mmzone.h, branch linux-2.6.38.y

thp: transparent hugepage vmstat

2011-01-14T01:32:43+00:00

Add hugepage stat information to /proc/vmstat and /proc/meminfo.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: kswapd: stop high-order balancing when any suitable zone is balanced

2011-01-14T01:32:37+00:00

Simon Kirby reported the following problem

   We're seeing cases on a number of servers where cache never fully
   grows to use all available memory.  Sometimes we see servers with 4 GB
   of memory that never seem to have less than 1.5 GB free, even with a
   constantly-active VM.  In some cases, these servers also swap out while
   this happens, even though they are constantly reading the working set
   into memory.  We have been seeing this happening for a long time; I
   don't think it's anything recent, and it still happens on 2.6.36.

After some debugging work by Simon, Dave Hansen and others, the prevaling
theory became that kswapd is reclaiming order-3 pages requested by SLUB
too aggressive about it.

There are two apparent problems here.  On the target machine, there is a
small Normal zone in comparison to DMA32.  As kswapd tries to balance all
zones, it would continually try reclaiming for Normal even though DMA32
was balanced enough for callers.  The second problem is that
sleeping_prematurely() does not use the same logic as balance_pgdat() when
deciding whether to sleep or not.  This keeps kswapd artifically awake.

A number of tests were run and the figures from previous postings will
look very different for a few reasons.  One, the old figures were forcing
my network card to use GFP_ATOMIC in attempt to replicate Simon's problem.
 Second, I previous specified slub_min_order=3 again in an attempt to
reproduce Simon's problem.  In this posting, I'm depending on Simon to say
whether his problem is fixed or not and these figures are to show the
impact to the ordinary cases.  Finally, the "vmscan" figures are taken
from /proc/vmstat instead of the tracepoints.  There is less information
but recording is less disruptive.

The first test of relevance was postmark with a process running in the
background reading a large amount of anonymous memory in blocks.  The
objective was to vaguely simulate what was happening on Simon's machine
and it's memory intensive enough to have kswapd awake.

POSTMARK
                                            traceonly          kanyzone
Transactions per second:              156.00 ( 0.00%)   153.00 (-1.96%)
Data megabytes read per second:        21.51 ( 0.00%)    21.52 ( 0.05%)
Data megabytes written per second:     29.28 ( 0.00%)    29.11 (-0.58%)
Files created alone per second:       250.00 ( 0.00%)   416.00 (39.90%)
Files create/transact per second:      79.00 ( 0.00%)    76.00 (-3.95%)
Files deleted alone per second:       520.00 ( 0.00%)   420.00 (-23.81%)
Files delete/transact per second:      79.00 ( 0.00%)    76.00 (-3.95%)

MMTests Statistics: duration
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds)         16.58      17.4
Total Elapsed Time (seconds)                218.48    222.47

VMstat Reclaim Statistics: vmscan
Direct reclaims                                  0          4
Direct reclaim pages scanned                     0        203
Direct reclaim pages reclaimed                   0        184
Kswapd pages scanned                        326631     322018
Kswapd pages reclaimed                      312632     309784
Kswapd low wmark quickly                         1          4
Kswapd high wmark quickly                      122        475
Kswapd skip congestion_wait                      1          0
Pages activated                             700040     705317
Pages deactivated                           212113     203922
Pages written                                 9875       6363

Total pages scanned                         326631    322221
Total pages reclaimed                       312632    309968
%age total pages scanned/reclaimed          95.71%    96.20%
%age total pages scanned/written             3.02%     1.97%

proc vmstat: Faults
Major Faults                                   300       254
Minor Faults                                645183    660284
Page ins                                    493588    486704
Page outs                                  4960088   4986704
Swap ins                                      1230       661
Swap outs                                     9869      6355

Performance is mildly affected because kswapd is no longer doing as much
work and the background memory consumer process is getting in the way.
Note that kswapd scanned and reclaimed fewer pages as it's less aggressive
and overall fewer pages were scanned and reclaimed.  Swap in/out is
particularly reduced again reflecting kswapd throwing out fewer pages.

The slight performance impact is unfortunate here but it looks like a
direct result of kswapd being less aggressive.  As the bug report is about
too many pages being freed by kswapd, it may have to be accepted for now.

The second test is a streaming IO benchmark that was previously used by
Johannes to show regressions in page reclaim.

MICRO
					 traceonly  kanyzone
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds)         29.29     28.87
Total Elapsed Time (seconds)                492.18    488.79

VMstat Reclaim Statistics: vmscan
Direct reclaims                               2128       1460
Direct reclaim pages scanned               2284822    1496067
Direct reclaim pages reclaimed              148919     110937
Kswapd pages scanned                      15450014   16202876
Kswapd pages reclaimed                     8503697    8537897
Kswapd low wmark quickly                      3100       3397
Kswapd high wmark quickly                     1860       7243
Kswapd skip congestion_wait                    708        801
Pages activated                               9635       9573
Pages deactivated                             1432       1271
Pages written                                  223       1130

Total pages scanned                       17734836  17698943
Total pages reclaimed                      8652616   8648834
%age total pages scanned/reclaimed          48.79%    48.87%
%age total pages scanned/written             0.00%     0.01%

proc vmstat: Faults
Major Faults                                   165       221
Minor Faults                               9655785   9656506
Page ins                                      3880      7228
Page outs                                 37692940  37480076
Swap ins                                         0        69
Swap outs                                       19        15

Again fewer pages are scanned and reclaimed as expected and this time the
test completed faster.  Note that kswapd is hitting its watermarks faster
(low and high wmark quickly) which I expect is due to kswapd reclaiming
fewer pages.

I also ran fs-mark, iozone and sysbench but there is nothing interesting
to report in the figures.  Performance is not significantly changed and
the reclaim statistics look reasonable.

Tgis patch:

When the allocator enters its slow path, kswapd is woken up to balance the
node.  It continues working until all zones within the node are balanced.
For order-0 allocations, this makes perfect sense but for higher orders it
can have unintended side-effects.  If the zone sizes are imbalanced,
kswapd may reclaim heavily within a smaller zone discarding an excessive
number of pages.  The user-visible behaviour is that kswapd is awake and
reclaiming even though plenty of pages are free from a suitable zone.

This patch alters the "balance" logic for high-order reclaim allowing
kswapd to stop if any suitable zone becomes balanced to reduce the number
of pages it reclaims from other zones.  kswapd still tries to ensure that
order-0 watermarks for all zones are met before sleeping.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Reviewed-by: Eric B Munson 
Cc: Simon Kirby 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Shaohua Li 
Cc: Dave Hansen 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: page allocator: adjust the per-cpu counter threshold when memory is low

2011-01-14T01:32:31+00:00

Commit aa45484 ("calculate a better estimate of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory
is low") noted that watermarks were based on the vmstat NR_FREE_PAGES.  To
avoid synchronization overhead, these counters are maintained on a per-cpu
basis and drained both periodically and when a threshold is above a
threshold.  On large CPU systems, the difference between the estimate and
real value of NR_FREE_PAGES can be very high.  The system can get into a
case where pages are allocated far below the min watermark potentially
causing livelock issues.  The commit solved the problem by taking a better
reading of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory was low.

Unfortately, as reported by Shaohua Li this accurate reading can consume a
large amount of CPU time on systems with many sockets due to cache line
bouncing.  This patch takes a different approach.  For large machines
where counter drift might be unsafe and while kswapd is awake, the per-cpu
thresholds for the target pgdat are reduced to limit the level of drift to
what should be a safe level.  This incurs a performance penalty in heavy
memory pressure by a factor that depends on the workload and the machine
but the machine should function correctly without accidentally exhausting
all memory on a node.  There is an additional cost when kswapd wakes and
sleeps but the event is not expected to be frequent - in Shaohua's test
case, there was one recorded sleep and wake event at least.

To ensure that kswapd wakes up, a safe version of zone_watermark_ok() is
introduced that takes a more accurate reading of NR_FREE_PAGES when called
from wakeup_kswapd, when deciding whether it is really safe to go back to
sleep in sleeping_prematurely() and when deciding if a zone is really
balanced or not in balance_pgdat().  We are still using an expensive
function but limiting how often it is called.

When the test case is reproduced, the time spent in the watermark
functions is reduced.  The following report is on the percentage of time
spent cumulatively spent in the functions zone_nr_free_pages(),
zone_watermark_ok(), __zone_watermark_ok(), zone_watermark_ok_safe(),
zone_page_state_snapshot(), zone_page_state().

vanilla                      11.6615%
disable-threshold            0.2584%

David said:

: We had to pull aa454840 "mm: page allocator: calculate a better estimate
: of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory is low and kswapd is awake" from 2.6.36
: internally because tests showed that it would cause the machine to stall
: as the result of heavy kswapd activity.  I merged it back with this fix as
: it is pending in the -mm tree and it solves the issue we were seeing, so I
: definitely think this should be pushed to -stable (and I would seriously
: consider it for 2.6.37 inclusion even at this late date).

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reported-by: Shaohua Li 
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter 
Tested-by: Nicolas Bareil 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Kyle McMartin 
Cc: 		[2.6.37.1, 2.6.36.x]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: do not sleep on the congestion queue if there are no congested BDIs or if significant congestion is not being encountered in the current zone

2010-10-26T23:52:07+00:00

If congestion_wait() is called with no BDI congested, the caller will
sleep for the full timeout and this may be an unnecessary sleep.  This
patch adds a wait_iff_congested() that checks congestion and only sleeps
if a BDI is congested else, it calls cond_resched() to ensure the caller
is not hogging the CPU longer than its quota but otherwise will not sleep.

This is aimed at reducing some of the major desktop stalls reported during
IO.  For example, while kswapd is operating, it calls congestion_wait()
but it could just have been reclaiming clean page cache pages with no
congestion.  Without this patch, it would sleep for a full timeout but
after this patch, it'll just call schedule() if it has been on the CPU too
long.  Similar logic applies to direct reclaimers that are not making
enough progress.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Jens Axboe 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

writeback: add nr_dirtied and nr_written to /proc/vmstat

2010-10-26T23:52:06+00:00

To help developers and applications gain visibility into writeback
behaviour adding two entries to vm_stat_items and /proc/vmstat.  This will
allow us to track the "written" and "dirtied" counts.

   # grep nr_dirtied /proc/vmstat
   nr_dirtied 3747
   # grep nr_written /proc/vmstat
   nr_written 3618

Signed-off-by: Michael Rubin 
Reviewed-by: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: Dave Chinner 
Cc: Jens Axboe 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Nick Piggin 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: page allocator: calculate a better estimate of NR_FREE_PAGES when memory is low and kswapd is awake

2010-09-10T01:57:25+00:00

Ordinarily watermark checks are based on the vmstat NR_FREE_PAGES as it is
cheaper than scanning a number of lists.  To avoid synchronization
overhead, counter deltas are maintained on a per-cpu basis and drained
both periodically and when the delta is above a threshold.  On large CPU
systems, the difference between the estimated and real value of
NR_FREE_PAGES can be very high.  If NR_FREE_PAGES is much higher than
number of real free page in buddy, the VM can allocate pages below min
watermark, at worst reducing the real number of pages to zero.  Even if
the OOM killer kills some victim for freeing memory, it may not free
memory if the exit path requires a new page resulting in livelock.

This patch introduces a zone_page_state_snapshot() function (courtesy of
Christoph) that takes a slightly more accurate view of an arbitrary vmstat
counter.  It is used to read NR_FREE_PAGES while kswapd is awake to avoid
the watermark being accidentally broken.  The estimate is not perfect and
may result in cache line bounces but is expected to be lighter than the
IPI calls necessary to continually drain the per-cpu counters while kswapd
is awake.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

2010-08-10T03:45:00+00:00

Since 2.6.28 zone->prev_priority is unused. Then it can be removed
safely. It reduce stack usage slightly.

Now I have to say that I'm sorry. 2 years ago, I thought prev_priority
can be integrate again, it's useful. but four (or more) times trying
haven't got good performance number. Thus I give up such approach.

The rest of this changelog is notes on prev_priority and why it existed in
the first place and why it might be not necessary any more. This information
is based heavily on discussions between Andrew Morton, Rik van Riel and
Kosaki Motohiro who is heavily quotes from.

Historically prev_priority was important because it determined when the VM
would start unmapping PTE pages. i.e. there are no balances of note within
the VM, Anon vs File and Mapped vs Unmapped. Without prev_priority, there
is a potential risk of unnecessarily increasing minor faults as a large
amount of read activity of use-once pages could push mapped pages to the
end of the LRU and get unmapped.

There is no proof this is still a problem but currently it is not considered
to be. Active files are not deactivated if the active file list is smaller
than the inactive list reducing the liklihood that file-mapped pages are
being pushed off the LRU and referenced executable pages are kept on the
active list to avoid them getting pushed out by read activity.

Even if it is a problem, prev_priority prev_priority wouldn't works
nowadays. First of all, current vmscan still a lot of UP centric code. it
expose some weakness on some dozens CPUs machine. I think we need more and
more improvement.

The problem is, current vmscan mix up per-system-pressure, per-zone-pressure
and per-task-pressure a bit. example, prev_priority try to boost priority to
other concurrent priority. but if the another task have mempolicy restriction,
it is unnecessary, but also makes wrong big latency and exceeding reclaim.
per-task based priority + prev_priority adjustment make the emulation of
per-system pressure. but it have two issue 1) too rough and brutal emulation
2) we need per-zone pressure, not per-system.

Another example, currently DEF_PRIORITY is 12. it mean the lru rotate about
2 cycle (1/4096 + 1/2048 + 1/1024 + .. + 1) before invoking OOM-Killer.
but if 10,0000 thrreads enter DEF_PRIORITY reclaim at the same time, the
system have higher memory pressure than priority==0 (1/4096*10,000 > 2).
prev_priority can't solve such multithreads workload issue. In other word,
prev_priority concept assume the sysmtem don't have lots threads."

Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Dave Chinner 
Cc: Chris Mason 
Cc: Nick Piggin 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Christoph Hellwig 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli 
Cc: Michael Rubin 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mmzone.h: remove dead prototype

2010-08-10T03:44:57+00:00

get_zone_counts() was dropped from kernel tree, see:
http://www.mail-archive.com/mm-commits@vger.kernel.org/msg07313.html but
its prototype remains.

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

numa: introduce numa_mem_id()- effective local memory node id

2010-05-27T16:12:57+00:00

Introduce numa_mem_id(), based on generic percpu variable infrastructure
to track "nearest node with memory" for archs that support memoryless
nodes.

Define API in  when CONFIG_HAVE_MEMORYLESS_NODES
defined, else stubs.  Architectures will define HAVE_MEMORYLESS_NODES
if/when they support them.

Archs can override definitions of:

numa_mem_id() - returns node number of "local memory" node
set_numa_mem() - initialize [this cpus'] per cpu variable 'numa_mem'
cpu_to_mem()  - return numa_mem for specified cpu; may be used as lvalue

Generic initialization of 'numa_mem' occurs in __build_all_zonelists().
This will initialize the boot cpu at boot time, and all cpus on change of
numa_zonelist_order, or when node or memory hot-plug requires zonelist
rebuild.  Archs that support memoryless nodes will need to initialize
'numa_mem' for secondary cpus as they're brought on-line.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn 
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Tejun Heo 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Nick Piggin 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Eric Whitney 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: Ingo Molnar 
Cc: Thomas Gleixner 
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" 
Cc: "Luck, Tony" 
Cc: Pekka Enberg 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mem-hotplug: fix potential race while building zonelist for new populated zone

2010-05-25T15:07:02+00:00

Add global mutex zonelists_mutex to fix the possible race:

     CPU0                                  CPU1                    CPU2
(1) zone->present_pages += online_pages;
(2)                                       build_all_zonelists();
(3)                                                               alloc_page();
(4)                                                               free_page();
(5) build_all_zonelists();
(6)   __build_all_zonelists();
(7)     zone->pageset = alloc_percpu();

In step (3,4), zone->pageset still points to boot_pageset, so bad
things may happen if 2+ nodes are in this state. Even if only 1 node
is accessing the boot_pageset, (3) may still consume too much memory
to fail the memory allocations in step (7).

Besides, atomic operation ensures alloc_percpu() in step (7) will never fail
since there is a new fresh memory block added in step(6).

[haicheng.li@linux.intel.com: hold zonelists_mutex when build_all_zonelists]
Signed-off-by: Haicheng Li 
Signed-off-by: Wu Fengguang 
Reviewed-by: Andi Kleen 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Mel Gorman 
Cc: Tejun Heo 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds