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 <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Bisection between 3.11 and 3.12 fingered commit 9824cf97 ("mm:
vmstats: tlb flush counters") to cause overhead problems.
The counters are undeniably useful but how often do we really
need to debug TLB flush related issues? It does not justify
taking the penalty everywhere so make it a debugging option.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Tested-by: Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Alex Shi <alex.shi@linaro.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-XzxjntugxuwpxXhcrxqqh53b@git.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Commit 0255d49184 ("mm: Account for a THP NUMA hinting update as one
PTE update") was added to account for the number of PTE updates when
marking pages prot_numa. task_numa_work was using the old return value
to track how much address space had been updated. Altering the return
value causes the scanner to do more work than it is configured or
documented to in a single unit of work.
This patch reverts that commit and accounts for the number of THP
updates separately in vmstat. It is up to the administrator to
interpret the pair of values correctly. This is a straight-forward
operation and likely to only be of interest when actively debugging NUMA
balancing problems.
The impact of this patch is that the NUMA PTE scanner will scan slower
when THP is enabled and workloads may converge slower as a result. On
the flip size system CPU usage should be lower than recent tests
reported. This is an illustrative example of a short single JVM specjbb
test
specjbb
3.12.0 3.12.0
vanilla acctupdates
TPut 1 26143.00 ( 0.00%) 25747.00 ( -1.51%)
TPut 7 185257.00 ( 0.00%) 183202.00 ( -1.11%)
TPut 13 329760.00 ( 0.00%) 346577.00 ( 5.10%)
TPut 19 442502.00 ( 0.00%) 460146.00 ( 3.99%)
TPut 25 540634.00 ( 0.00%) 549053.00 ( 1.56%)
TPut 31 512098.00 ( 0.00%) 519611.00 ( 1.47%)
TPut 37 461276.00 ( 0.00%) 474973.00 ( 2.97%)
TPut 43 403089.00 ( 0.00%) 414172.00 ( 2.75%)
3.12.0 3.12.0
vanillaacctupdates
User 5169.64 5184.14
System 100.45 80.02
Elapsed 252.75 251.85
Performance is similar but note the reduction in system CPU time. While
this showed a performance gain, it will not be universal but at least
it'll be behaving as documented. The vmstats are obviously different but
here is an obvious interpretation of them from mmtests.
3.12.0 3.12.0
vanillaacctupdates
NUMA page range updates 1408326 11043064
NUMA huge PMD updates 0 21040
NUMA PTE updates 1408326 291624
"NUMA page range updates" == nr_pte_updates and is the value returned to
the NUMA pte scanner. NUMA huge PMD updates were the number of THP
updates which in combination can be used to calculate how many ptes were
updated from userspace.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reported-by: Alex Thorlton <athorlton@sgi.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The previous patch doing vmstats for TLB flushes ("mm: vmstats: tlb flush
counters") effectively missed UP since arch/x86/mm/tlb.c is only compiled
for SMP.
UP systems do not do remote TLB flushes, so compile those counters out on
UP.
arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mtrr/generic.c calls __flush_tlb() directly. This is
probably an optimization since both the mtrr code and __flush_tlb() write
cr4. It would probably be safe to make that a flush_tlb_all() (and then
get these statistics), but the mtrr code is ancient and I'm hesitant to
touch it other than to just stick in the counters.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak comments]
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
I was investigating some TLB flush scaling issues and realized that we do
not have any good methods for figuring out how many TLB flushes we are
doing.
It would be nice to be able to do these in generic code, but the
arch-independent calls don't explicitly specify whether we actually need
to do remote flushes or not. In the end, we really need to know if we
actually _did_ global vs. local invalidations, so that leaves us with few
options other than to muck with the counters from arch-specific code.
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
From: Zlatko Calusic <zlatko.calusic@iskon.hr>
Commit 92df3a723f ("mm: vmscan: throttle reclaim if encountering too
many dirty pages under writeback") introduced waiting on congested zones
based on a sane algorithm in shrink_inactive_list().
What this means is that there's no more need for throttling and
additional heuristics in balance_pgdat(). So, let's remove it and tidy
up the code.
Signed-off-by: Zlatko Calusic <zlatko.calusic@iskon.hr>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Merge tag 'balancenuma-v11' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mel/linux-balancenuma
Pull Automatic NUMA Balancing bare-bones from Mel Gorman:
"There are three implementations for NUMA balancing, this tree
(balancenuma), numacore which has been developed in tip/master and
autonuma which is in aa.git.
In almost all respects balancenuma is the dumbest of the three because
its main impact is on the VM side with no attempt to be smart about
scheduling. In the interest of getting the ball rolling, it would be
desirable to see this much merged for 3.8 with the view to building
scheduler smarts on top and adapting the VM where required for 3.9.
The most recent set of comparisons available from different people are
mel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/9/108
mingo: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/7/331
tglx: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/10/437
srikar: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/10/397
The results are a mixed bag. In my own tests, balancenuma does
reasonably well. It's dumb as rocks and does not regress against
mainline. On the other hand, Ingo's tests shows that balancenuma is
incapable of converging for this workloads driven by perf which is bad
but is potentially explained by the lack of scheduler smarts. Thomas'
results show balancenuma improves on mainline but falls far short of
numacore or autonuma. Srikar's results indicate we all suffer on a
large machine with imbalanced node sizes.
My own testing showed that recent numacore results have improved
dramatically, particularly in the last week but not universally.
We've butted heads heavily on system CPU usage and high levels of
migration even when it shows that overall performance is better.
There are also cases where it regresses. Of interest is that for
specjbb in some configurations it will regress for lower numbers of
warehouses and show gains for higher numbers which is not reported by
the tool by default and sometimes missed in treports. Recently I
reported for numacore that the JVM was crashing with
NullPointerExceptions but currently it's unclear what the source of
this problem is. Initially I thought it was in how numacore batch
handles PTEs but I'm no longer think this is the case. It's possible
numacore is just able to trigger it due to higher rates of migration.
These reports were quite late in the cycle so I/we would like to start
with this tree as it contains much of the code we can agree on and has
not changed significantly over the last 2-3 weeks."
* tag 'balancenuma-v11' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mel/linux-balancenuma: (50 commits)
mm/rmap, migration: Make rmap_walk_anon() and try_to_unmap_anon() more scalable
mm/rmap: Convert the struct anon_vma::mutex to an rwsem
mm: migrate: Account a transhuge page properly when rate limiting
mm: numa: Account for failed allocations and isolations as migration failures
mm: numa: Add THP migration for the NUMA working set scanning fault case build fix
mm: numa: Add THP migration for the NUMA working set scanning fault case.
mm: sched: numa: Delay PTE scanning until a task is scheduled on a new node
mm: sched: numa: Control enabling and disabling of NUMA balancing if !SCHED_DEBUG
mm: sched: numa: Control enabling and disabling of NUMA balancing
mm: sched: Adapt the scanning rate if a NUMA hinting fault does not migrate
mm: numa: Use a two-stage filter to restrict pages being migrated for unlikely task<->node relationships
mm: numa: migrate: Set last_nid on newly allocated page
mm: numa: split_huge_page: Transfer last_nid on tail page
mm: numa: Introduce last_nid to the page frame
sched: numa: Slowly increase the scanning period as NUMA faults are handled
mm: numa: Rate limit setting of pte_numa if node is saturated
mm: numa: Rate limit the amount of memory that is migrated between nodes
mm: numa: Structures for Migrate On Fault per NUMA migration rate limiting
mm: numa: Migrate pages handled during a pmd_numa hinting fault
mm: numa: Migrate on reference policy
...
hzp_alloc is incremented every time a huge zero page is successfully
allocated. It includes allocations which where dropped due
race with other allocation. Note, it doesn't count every map
of the huge zero page, only its allocation.
hzp_alloc_failed is incremented if kernel fails to allocate huge zero
page and falls back to using small pages.
Signed-off-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
It is tricky to quantify the basic cost of automatic NUMA placement in a
meaningful manner. This patch adds some vmstats that can be used as part
of a basic costing model.
u = basic unit = sizeof(void *)
Ca = cost of struct page access = sizeof(struct page) / u
Cpte = Cost PTE access = Ca
Cupdate = Cost PTE update = (2 * Cpte) + (2 * Wlock)
where Cpte is incurred twice for a read and a write and Wlock
is a constant representing the cost of taking or releasing a
lock
Cnumahint = Cost of a minor page fault = some high constant e.g. 1000
Cpagerw = Cost to read or write a full page = Ca + PAGE_SIZE/u
Ci = Cost of page isolation = Ca + Wi
where Wi is a constant that should reflect the approximate cost
of the locking operation
Cpagecopy = Cpagerw + (Cpagerw * Wnuma) + Ci + (Ci * Wnuma)
where Wnuma is the approximate NUMA factor. 1 is local. 1.2
would imply that remote accesses are 20% more expensive
Balancing cost = Cpte * numa_pte_updates +
Cnumahint * numa_hint_faults +
Ci * numa_pages_migrated +
Cpagecopy * numa_pages_migrated
Note that numa_pages_migrated is used as a measure of how many pages
were isolated even though it would miss pages that failed to migrate. A
vmstat counter could have been added for it but the isolation cost is
pretty marginal in comparison to the overall cost so it seemed overkill.
The ideal way to measure automatic placement benefit would be to count
the number of remote accesses versus local accesses and do something like
benefit = (remote_accesses_before - remove_access_after) * Wnuma
but the information is not readily available. As a workload converges, the
expection would be that the number of remote numa hints would reduce to 0.
convergence = numa_hint_faults_local / numa_hint_faults
where this is measured for the last N number of
numa hints recorded. When the workload is fully
converged the value is 1.
This can measure if the placement policy is converging and how fast it is
doing it.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Compaction already has tracepoints to count scanned and isolated pages
but it requires that ftrace be enabled and if that information has to be
written to disk then it can be disruptive. This patch adds vmstat counters
for compaction called compact_migrate_scanned, compact_free_scanned and
compact_isolated.
With these counters, it is possible to define a basic cost model for
compaction. This approximates of how much work compaction is doing and can
be compared that with an oprofile showing TLB misses and see if the cost of
compaction is being offset by THP for example. Minimally a compaction patch
can be evaluated in terms of whether it increases or decreases cost. The
basic cost model looks like this
Fundamental unit u: a word sizeof(void *)
Ca = cost of struct page access = sizeof(struct page) / u
Cmc = Cost migrate page copy = (Ca + PAGE_SIZE/u) * 2
Cmf = Cost migrate failure = Ca * 2
Ci = Cost page isolation = (Ca + Wi)
where Wi is a constant that should reflect the approximate
cost of the locking operation.
Csm = Cost migrate scanning = Ca
Csf = Cost free scanning = Ca
Overall cost = (Csm * compact_migrate_scanned) +
(Csf * compact_free_scanned) +
(Ci * compact_isolated) +
(Cmc * pgmigrate_success) +
(Cmf * pgmigrate_failed)
Where the values are read from /proc/vmstat.
This is very basic and ignores certain costs such as the allocation cost
to do a migrate page copy but any improvement to the model would still
use the same vmstat counters.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
The compact_pages_moved and compact_pagemigrate_failed events are
convenient for determining if compaction is active and to what
degree migration is succeeding but it's at the wrong level. Other
users of migration may also want to know if migration is working
properly and this will be particularly true for any automated
NUMA migration. This patch moves the counters down to migration
with the new events called pgmigrate_success and pgmigrate_fail.
The compact_blocks_moved counter is removed because while it was
useful for debugging initially, it's worthless now as no meaningful
conclusions can be drawn from its value.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Simply remove UNEVICTABLE_MLOCKFREED and unevictable_pgs_mlockfreed line
from /proc/vmstat: Johannes and Mel point out that it was very unlikely to
have been used by any tool, and of course we can restore it easily enough
if that turns out to be wrong.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
We should not be seeing non-0 unevictable_pgs_mlockfreed any longer. So
remove free_page_mlock() from the page freeing paths: __PG_MLOCKED is
already in PAGE_FLAGS_CHECK_AT_FREE, so free_pages_check() will now be
checking it, reporting "BUG: Bad page state" if it's ever found set.
Comment UNEVICTABLE_MLOCKFREED and unevictable_pgs_mlockfreed always 0.
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Under significant pressure when writing back to network-backed storage,
direct reclaimers may get throttled. This is expected to be a short-lived
event and the processes get woken up again but processes do get stalled.
This patch counts how many times such stalling occurs. It's up to the
administrator whether to reduce these stalls by increasing
min_free_kbytes.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Christie <michaelc@cs.wisc.edu>
Cc: Eric B Munson <emunson@mgebm.net>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The "pgsteal" stat is confusing because it counts both direct reclaim as
well as background reclaim. However, we have "kswapd_steal" which also
counts background reclaim value.
This patch fixes it and also makes it match the existng "pgscan_" stats.
Test:
pgsteal_kswapd_dma32 447623
pgsteal_kswapd_normal 42272677
pgsteal_kswapd_movable 0
pgsteal_direct_dma32 2801
pgsteal_direct_normal 44353270
pgsteal_direct_movable 0
Signed-off-by: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Hillf Danton <dhillf@gmail.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
enums are problematic because they cannot be forward-declared:
akpm2:/home/akpm> cat t.c
enum foo;
static inline void bar(enum foo f)
{
}
akpm2:/home/akpm> gcc -c t.c
t.c:4: error: parameter 1 ('f') has incomplete type
So move the enum's definition into a standalone header file which can be used
wherever its definition is needed.
Cc: Ying Han <yinghan@google.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp>
Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Dave Hansen