The determination of the dirty ratio to determine writeback behavior is
currently based on the number of total pages on the system.
However, not all pages in the system may be dirtied. Thus the ratio is always
too low and can never reach 100%. The ratio may be particularly skewed if
large hugepage allocations, slab allocations or device driver buffers make
large sections of memory not available anymore. In that case we may get into
a situation in which f.e. the background writeback ratio of 40% cannot be
reached anymore which leads to undesired writeback behavior.
This patchset fixes that issue by determining the ratio based on the actual
pages that may potentially be dirty. These are the pages on the active and
the inactive list plus free pages.
The problem with those counts has so far been that it is expensive to
calculate these because counts from multiple nodes and multiple zones will
have to be summed up. This patchset makes these counters ZVC counters. This
means that a current sum per zone, per node and for the whole system is always
available via global variables and not expensive anymore to calculate.
The patchset results in some other good side effects:
- Removal of the various functions that sum up free, active and inactive
page counts
- Cleanup of the functions that display information via the proc filesystem.
This patch:
The use of a ZVC for nr_inactive and nr_active allows a simplification of some
counter operations. More ZVC functionality is used for sums etc in the
following patches.
[akpm@osdl.org: UP build fix]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
In the page release paths, we can be sure that nobody will mess with our
page->flags because the refcount has dropped to 0. So no need for atomic
operations here.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Migration code currently does not take a reference to target page
properly, so between unlocking the pte and trying to take a new
reference to the page with isolate_lru_page, anything could happen to
it.
Fix this by holding the pte lock until we get a chance to elevate the
refcount.
Other small cleanups while we're here.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This is the start of the `swap migration' patch series.
Swap migration allows the moving of the physical location of pages between
nodes in a numa system while the process is running. This means that the
virtual addresses that the process sees do not change. However, the system
rearranges the physical location of those pages.
The main intent of page migration patches here is to reduce the latency of
memory access by moving pages near to the processor where the process
accessing that memory is running.
The patchset allows a process to manually relocate the node on which its
pages are located through the MF_MOVE and MF_MOVE_ALL options while
setting a new memory policy.
The pages of process can also be relocated from another process using the
sys_migrate_pages() function call. Requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN. The migrate_pages
function call takes two sets of nodes and moves pages of a process that are
located on the from nodes to the destination nodes.
Manual migration is very useful if for example the scheduler has relocated a
process to a processor on a distant node. A batch scheduler or an
administrator can detect the situation and move the pages of the process
nearer to the new processor.
sys_migrate_pages() could be used on non-numa machines as well, to force all
of a particualr process's pages out to swap, if someone thinks that's useful.
Larger installations usually partition the system using cpusets into sections
of nodes. Paul has equipped cpusets with the ability to move pages when a
task is moved to another cpuset. This allows automatic control over locality
of a process. If a task is moved to a new cpuset then also all its pages are
moved with it so that the performance of the process does not sink
dramatically (as is the case today).
Swap migration works by simply evicting the page. The pages must be faulted
back in. The pages are then typically reallocated by the system near the node
where the process is executing.
For swap migration the destination of the move is controlled by the allocation
policy. Cpusets set the allocation policy before calling sys_migrate_pages()
in order to move the pages as intended.
No allocation policy changes are performed for sys_migrate_pages(). This
means that the pages may not faulted in to the specified nodes if no
allocation policy was set by other means. The pages will just end up near the
node where the fault occurred.
There's another patch series in the pipeline which implements "direct
migration".
The direct migration patchset extends the migration functionality to avoid
going through swap. The destination node of the relation is controllable
during the actual moving of pages. The crutch of using the allocation policy
to relocate is not necessary and the pages are moved directly to the target.
Its also faster since swap is not used.
And sys_migrate_pages() can then move pages directly to the specified node.
Implement functions to isolate pages from the LRU and put them back later.
This patch:
An earlier implementation was provided by Hirokazu Takahashi
<taka@valinux.co.jp> and IWAMOTO Toshihiro <iwamoto@valinux.co.jp> for the
memory hotplug project.
From: Magnus
This breaks out isolate_lru_page() and putpack_lru_page(). Needed for swap
migration.
Signed-off-by: Magnus Damm <magnus.damm@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Christoph Lameter