linux.git/mm/vmstat.c, branch v2.6.36

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

vmstat: update zone stat threshold when onlining a cpu

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

refresh_zone_stat_thresholds() calculates parameter based on the number of
online cpus.  It's called at cpu offlining but needs to be called at
onlining, too.

Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Acked-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

mm: use for_each_online_cpu() in vmstat

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

The sum_vm_events passes cpumask for for_each_cpu().  But it's useless
since we have for_each_online_cpu.  Althougth it's tirival overhead, it's
not good about coding consistency.

Let's use for_each_online_cpu instead of for_each_cpu with cpumask
argument.

Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim 
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter 
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: direct compact when a high-order allocation fails

2010-05-25T15:06:59+00:00

Ordinarily when a high-order allocation fails, direct reclaim is entered
to free pages to satisfy the allocation.  With this patch, it is
determined if an allocation failed due to external fragmentation instead
of low memory and if so, the calling process will compact until a suitable
page is freed.  Compaction by moving pages in memory is considerably
cheaper than paging out to disk and works where there are locked pages or
no swap.  If compaction fails to free a page of a suitable size, then
reclaim will still occur.

Direct compaction returns as soon as possible.  As each block is
compacted, it is checked if a suitable page has been freed and if so, it
returns.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Fix build errors]
[aarcange@redhat.com: fix count_vm_event preempt in memory compaction direct reclaim]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: compaction: memory compaction core

2010-05-25T15:06:59+00:00

This patch is the core of a mechanism which compacts memory in a zone by
relocating movable pages towards the end of the zone.

A single compaction run involves a migration scanner and a free scanner.
Both scanners operate on pageblock-sized areas in the zone.  The migration
scanner starts at the bottom of the zone and searches for all movable
pages within each area, isolating them onto a private list called
migratelist.  The free scanner starts at the top of the zone and searches
for suitable areas and consumes the free pages within making them
available for the migration scanner.  The pages isolated for migration are
then migrated to the newly isolated free pages.

[aarcange@redhat.com: Fix unsafe optimisation]
[mel@csn.ul.ie: do not schedule work on other CPUs for compaction]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: export fragmentation index via debugfs

2010-05-25T15:06:59+00:00

The fragmentation fragmentation index, is only meaningful if an allocation
would fail and indicates what the failure is due to.  A value of -1 such
as in many of the examples above states that the allocation would succeed.
 If it would fail, the value is between 0 and 1.  A value tending towards
0 implies the allocation failed due to a lack of memory.  A value tending
towards 1 implies it failed due to external fragmentation.

For the most part, the huge page size will be the size of interest but not
necessarily so it is exported on a per-order and per-zo basis via
/sys/kernel/debug/extfrag/extfrag_index

> cat /sys/kernel/debug/extfrag/extfrag_index
Node 0, zone      DMA -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.00
Node 0, zone   Normal -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 -1.000 0.954

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Acked-by: Rik van Riel 
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: export unusable free space index via debugfs

2010-05-25T15:06:59+00:00

The unusable free space index measures how much of the available free
memory cannot be used to satisfy an allocation of a given size and is a
value between 0 and 1.  The higher the value, the more of free memory is
unusable and by implication, the worse the external fragmentation is.  For
the most part, the huge page size will be the size of interest but not
necessarily so it is exported on a per-order and per-zone basis via
/sys/kernel/debug/extfrag/unusable_index.

> cat /sys/kernel/debug/extfrag/unusable_index
Node 0, zone      DMA 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.001 0.005 0.013 0.021 0.037 0.037 0.101 0.230
Node 0, zone   Normal 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.001 0.002 0.002 0.005 0.015 0.028 0.028 0.054

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Fix allnoconfig]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim 
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Rik van Riel 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h

2010-03-30T13:02:32+00:00

percpu.h is included by sched.h and module.h and thus ends up being
included when building most .c files.  percpu.h includes slab.h which
in turn includes gfp.h making everything defined by the two files
universally available and complicating inclusion dependencies.

percpu.h -> slab.h dependency is about to be removed.  Prepare for
this change by updating users of gfp and slab facilities include those
headers directly instead of assuming availability.  As this conversion
needs to touch large number of source files, the following script is
used as the basis of conversion.

  http://userweb.kernel.org/~tj/misc/slabh-sweep.py

The script does the followings.

* Scan files for gfp and slab usages and update includes such that
  only the necessary includes are there.  ie. if only gfp is used,
  gfp.h, if slab is used, slab.h.

* When the script inserts a new include, it looks at the include
  blocks and try to put the new include such that its order conforms
  to its surrounding.  It's put in the include block which contains
  core kernel includes, in the same order that the rest are ordered -
  alphabetical, Christmas tree, rev-Xmas-tree or at the end if there
  doesn't seem to be any matching order.

* If the script can't find a place to put a new include (mostly
  because the file doesn't have fitting include block), it prints out
  an error message indicating which .h file needs to be added to the
  file.

The conversion was done in the following steps.

1. The initial automatic conversion of all .c files updated slightly
   over 4000 files, deleting around 700 includes and adding ~480 gfp.h
   and ~3000 slab.h inclusions.  The script emitted errors for ~400
   files.

2. Each error was manually checked.  Some didn't need the inclusion,
   some needed manual addition while adding it to implementation .h or
   embedding .c file was more appropriate for others.  This step added
   inclusions to around 150 files.

3. The script was run again and the output was compared to the edits
   from #2 to make sure no file was left behind.

4. Several build tests were done and a couple of problems were fixed.
   e.g. lib/decompress_*.c used malloc/free() wrappers around slab
   APIs requiring slab.h to be added manually.

5. The script was run on all .h files but without automatically
   editing them as sprinkling gfp.h and slab.h inclusions around .h
   files could easily lead to inclusion dependency hell.  Most gfp.h
   inclusion directives were ignored as stuff from gfp.h was usually
   wildly available and often used in preprocessor macros.  Each
   slab.h inclusion directive was examined and added manually as
   necessary.

6. percpu.h was updated not to include slab.h.

7. Build test were done on the following configurations and failures
   were fixed.  CONFIG_GCOV_KERNEL was turned off for all tests (as my
   distributed build env didn't work with gcov compiles) and a few
   more options had to be turned off depending on archs to make things
   build (like ipr on powerpc/64 which failed due to missing writeq).

   * x86 and x86_64 UP and SMP allmodconfig and a custom test config.
   * powerpc and powerpc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * sparc and sparc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * ia64 SMP allmodconfig
   * s390 SMP allmodconfig
   * alpha SMP allmodconfig
   * um on x86_64 SMP allmodconfig

8. percpu.h modifications were reverted so that it could be applied as
   a separate patch and serve as bisection point.

Given the fact that I had only a couple of failures from tests on step
6, I'm fairly confident about the coverage of this conversion patch.
If there is a breakage, it's likely to be something in one of the arch
headers which should be easily discoverable easily on most builds of
the specific arch.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo 
Guess-its-ok-by: Christoph Lameter 
Cc: Ingo Molnar 
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn

mm: restore zone->all_unreclaimable to independence word

2010-03-06T19:26:25+00:00

commit e815af95 ("change all_unreclaimable zone member to flags") changed
all_unreclaimable member to bit flag.  But it had an undesireble side
effect.  free_one_page() is one of most hot path in linux kernel and
increasing atomic ops in it can reduce kernel performance a bit.

Thus, this patch revert such commit partially. at least
all_unreclaimable shouldn't share memory word with other zone flags.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix patch interaction]
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Wu Fengguang 
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Cc: Minchan Kim 
Cc: Huang Shijie 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds