8 commits

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Paul Jackson	c801ed3860	x86 boot: simplify pageblock_bits enum declaration ... The use of #defines with '##' pre-processor concatenation is a useful way to form several symbol names with a common pattern. But when there is just a single name obtained from that #define, it's just obfuscation. Better to just write the plain symbol name, as is. The following patch is a result of my wasting ten minutes looking through the kernel to figure out what 'PB_migrate_end' meant, and forgetting what I came to do, by the time I figured out that the #define PB_range macro defined it. Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>	2008-05-25 10:55:11 +02:00
KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki	a5d76b54a3	memory unplug: page isolation ... Implement generic chunk-of-pages isolation method by using page grouping ops. This patch add MIGRATE_ISOLATE to MIGRATE_TYPES. By this - MIGRATE_TYPES increases. - bitmap for migratetype is enlarged. pages of MIGRATE_ISOLATE migratetype will not be allocated even if it is free. By this, you can isolated *freed* pages from users. How-to-free pages is not a purpose of this patch. You may use reclaim and migrate codes to free pages. If start_isolate_page_range(start,end) is called, - migratetype of the range turns to be MIGRATE_ISOLATE if its type is MIGRATE_MOVABLE. (*) this check can be updated if other memory reclaiming works make progress. - MIGRATE_ISOLATE is not on migratetype fallback list. - All free pages and will-be-freed pages are isolated. To check all pages in the range are isolated or not, use test_pages_isolated(), To cancel isolation, use undo_isolate_page_range(). Changes V6 -> V7 - removed unnecessary #ifdef There are HOLES_IN_ZONE handling codes...I'm glad if we can remove them.. Signed-off-by: Yasunori Goto <y-goto@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2007-10-16 09:43:02 -07:00
Mel Gorman	d9c2340052	Do not depend on MAX_ORDER when grouping pages by mobility ... Currently mobility grouping works at the MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES level. This makes sense for the majority of users where this is also the huge page size. However, on platforms like ia64 where the huge page size is runtime configurable it is desirable to group at a lower order. On x86_64 and occasionally on x86, the hugepage size may not always be MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES. This patch groups pages together based on the value of HUGETLB_PAGE_ORDER. It uses a compile-time constant if possible and a variable where the huge page size is runtime configurable. It is assumed that grouping should be done at the lowest sensible order and that the user would not want to override this. If this is not true, page_block order could be forced to a variable initialised via a boot-time kernel parameter. One potential issue with this patch is that IA64 now parses hugepagesz with early_param() instead of __setup(). __setup() is called after the memory allocator has been initialised and the pageblock bitmaps already setup. In tests on one IA64 there did not seem to be any problem with using early_param() and in fact may be more correct as it guarantees the parameter is handled before the parsing of hugepages=. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2007-10-16 09:43:00 -07:00
Mel Gorman	64c5e135bf	don't group high order atomic allocations ... Grouping high-order atomic allocations together was intended to allow bursty users of atomic allocations to work such as e1000 in situations where their preallocated buffers were depleted. This did not work in at least one case with a wireless network adapter needing order-1 allocations frequently. To resolve that, the free pages used for min_free_kbytes were moved to separate contiguous blocks with the patch bias-the-location-of-pages-freed-for-min_free_kbytes-in-the-same-max_order_nr_pages-blocks. It is felt that keeping the free pages in the same contiguous blocks should be sufficient for bursty short-lived high-order atomic allocations to succeed, maybe even with the e1000. Even if there is a failure, increasing the value of min_free_kbytes will free pages as contiguous bloks in contrast to the standard buddy allocator which makes no attempt to keep the minimum number of free pages contiguous. This patch backs out grouping high order atomic allocations together to determine if it is really needed or not. If a new report comes in about high-order atomic allocations failing, the feature can be reintroduced to determine if it fixes the problem or not. As a side-effect, this patch reduces by 1 the number of bits required to track the mobility type of pages within a MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES block. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2007-10-16 09:43:00 -07:00
Mel Gorman	56fd56b868	Bias the location of pages freed for min_free_kbytes in the same MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES blocks ... The standard buddy allocator always favours the smallest block of pages. The effect of this is that the pages free to satisfy min_free_kbytes tends to be preserved since boot time at the same location of memory ffor a very long time and as a contiguous block. When an administrator sets the reserve at 16384 at boot time, it tends to be the same MAX_ORDER blocks that remain free. This allows the occasional high atomic allocation to succeed up until the point the blocks are split. In practice, it is difficult to split these blocks but when they do split, the benefit of having min_free_kbytes for contiguous blocks disappears. Additionally, increasing min_free_kbytes once the system has been running for some time has no guarantee of creating contiguous blocks. On the other hand, CONFIG_PAGE_GROUP_BY_MOBILITY favours splitting large blocks when there are no free pages of the appropriate type available. A side-effect of this is that all blocks in memory tends to be used up and the contiguous free blocks from boot time are not preserved like in the vanilla allocator. This can cause a problem if a new caller is unwilling to reclaim or does not reclaim for long enough. A failure scenario was found for a wireless network device allocating order-1 atomic allocations but the allocations were not intense or frequent enough for a whole block of pages to be preserved for MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC. This was reproduced on a desktop by booting with mem=256mb, forcing the driver to allocate at order-1, running a bittorrent client (downloading a debian ISO) and building a kernel with -j2. This patch addresses the problem on the desktop machine booted with mem=256mb. It works by setting aside a reserve of MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES blocks, the number of which depends on the value of min_free_kbytes. These blocks are only fallen back to when there is no other free pages. Then the smallest possible page is used just like the normal buddy allocator instead of the largest possible page to preserve contiguous pages The pages in free lists in the reserve blocks are never taken for another migrate type. The results is that even if min_free_kbytes is set to a low value, contiguous blocks will be preserved in the MIGRATE_RESERVE blocks. This works better than the vanilla allocator because if min_free_kbytes is increased, a new reserve block will be chosen based on the location of reclaimable pages and the block will free up as contiguous pages. In the vanilla allocator, no effort is made to target a block of pages to free as contiguous pages and min_free_kbytes pages are scattered randomly. This effect has been observed on the test machine. min_free_kbytes was set initially low but it was kept as a contiguous free block within MIGRATE_RESERVE. min_free_kbytes was then set to a higher value and over a period of time, the free blocks were within the reserve and coalescing. How long it takes to free up depends on how quickly LRU is rotating. Amusingly, this means that more activity will free the blocks faster. This mechanism potentially replaces MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC as it may be more effective than grouping contiguous free pages together. It all depends on whether the number of active atomic high allocations exceeds min_free_kbytes or not. If the number of active allocations exceeds min_free_kbytes, it's worth it but maybe in that situation, min_free_kbytes should be set higher. Once there are no more reports of allocation failures, a patch will be submitted that backs out MIGRATE_HIGHALLOC and see if the reports stay missing. Credit to Mariusz Kozlowski for discovering the problem, describing the failure scenario and testing patches and scenarios. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: cleanups] Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Acked-by: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2007-10-16 09:43:00 -07:00
Mel Gorman	e12ba74d8f	Group short-lived and reclaimable kernel allocations ... This patch marks a number of allocations that are either short-lived such as network buffers or are reclaimable such as inode allocations. When something like updatedb is called, long-lived and unmovable kernel allocations tend to be spread throughout the address space which increases fragmentation. This patch groups these allocations together as much as possible by adding a new MIGRATE_TYPE. The MIGRATE_RECLAIMABLE type is for allocations that can be reclaimed on demand, but not moved. i.e. they can be migrated by deleting them and re-reading the information from elsewhere. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2007-10-16 09:43:00 -07:00
Mel Gorman	b2a0ac8875	Split the free lists for movable and unmovable allocations ... This patch adds the core of the fragmentation reduction strategy. It works by grouping pages together based on their ability to migrate or be reclaimed. Basically, it works by breaking the list in zone->free_area list into MIGRATE_TYPES number of lists. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2007-10-16 09:42:59 -07:00
Mel Gorman	835c134ec4	Add a bitmap that is used to track flags affecting a block of pages ... Here is the latest revision of the anti-fragmentation patches. Of particular note in this version is special treatment of high-order atomic allocations. Care is taken to group them together and avoid grouping pages of other types near them. Artifical tests imply that it works. I'm trying to get the hardware together that would allow setting up of a "real" test. If anyone already has a setup and test that can trigger the atomic-allocation problem, I'd appreciate a test of these patches and a report. The second major change is that these patches will apply cleanly with patches that implement anti-fragmentation through zones. kernbench shows effectively no performance difference varying between -0.2% and +2% on a variety of test machines. Success rates for huge page allocation are dramatically increased. For example, on a ppc64 machine, the vanilla kernel was only able to allocate 1% of memory as a hugepage and this was due to a single hugepage reserved as min_free_kbytes. With these patches applied, 17% was allocatable as superpages. With reclaim-related fixes from Andy Whitcroft, it was 40% and further reclaim-related improvements should increase this further. Changelog Since V28 o Group high-order atomic allocations together o It is no longer required to set min_free_kbytes to 10% of memory. A value of 16384 in most cases will be sufficient o Now applied with zone-based anti-fragmentation o Fix incorrect VM_BUG_ON within buffered_rmqueue() o Reorder the stack so later patches do not back out work from earlier patches o Fix bug were journal pages were being treated as movable o Bias placement of non-movable pages to lower PFNs o More agressive clustering of reclaimable pages in reactions to workloads like updatedb that flood the size of inode caches Changelog Since V27 o Renamed anti-fragmentation to Page Clustering. Anti-fragmentation was giving the mistaken impression that it was the 100% solution for high order allocations. Instead, it greatly increases the chances high-order allocations will succeed and lays the foundation for defragmentation and memory hot-remove to work properly o Redefine page groupings based on ability to migrate or reclaim instead of basing on reclaimability alone o Get rid of spurious inits o Per-cpu lists are no longer split up per-type. Instead the per-cpu list is searched for a page of the appropriate type o Added more explanation commentary o Fix up bug in pageblock code where bitmap was used before being initalised Changelog Since V26 o Fix double init of lists in setup_pageset Changelog Since V25 o Fix loop order of for_each_rclmtype_order so that order of loop matches args o gfpflags_to_rclmtype uses gfp_t instead of unsigned long o Rename get_pageblock_type() to get_page_rclmtype() o Fix alignment problem in move_freepages() o Add mechanism for assigning flags to blocks of pages instead of page->flags o On fallback, do not examine the preferred list of free pages a second time The purpose of these patches is to reduce external fragmentation by grouping pages of related types together. When pages are migrated (or reclaimed under memory pressure), large contiguous pages will be freed. This patch works by categorising allocations by their ability to migrate; Movable - The pages may be moved with the page migration mechanism. These are generally userspace pages. Reclaimable - These are allocations for some kernel caches that are reclaimable or allocations that are known to be very short-lived. Unmovable - These are pages that are allocated by the kernel that are not trivially reclaimed. For example, the memory allocated for a loaded module would be in this category. By default, allocations are considered to be of this type HighAtomic - These are high-order allocations belonging to callers that cannot sleep or perform any IO. In practice, this is restricted to jumbo frame allocation for network receive. It is assumed that the allocations are short-lived Instead of having one MAX_ORDER-sized array of free lists in struct free_area, there is one for each type of reclaimability. Once a 2^MAX_ORDER block of pages is split for a type of allocation, it is added to the free-lists for that type, in effect reserving it. Hence, over time, pages of the different types can be clustered together. When the preferred freelists are expired, the largest possible block is taken from an alternative list. Buddies that are split from that large block are placed on the preferred allocation-type freelists to mitigate fragmentation. This implementation gives best-effort for low fragmentation in all zones. Ideally, min_free_kbytes needs to be set to a value equal to 4 * (1 << (MAX_ORDER-1)) pages in most cases. This would be 16384 on x86 and x86_64 for example. Our tests show that about 60-70% of physical memory can be allocated on a desktop after a few days uptime. In benchmarks and stress tests, we are finding that 80% of memory is available as contiguous blocks at the end of the test. To compare, a standard kernel was getting < 1% of memory as large pages on a desktop and about 8-12% of memory as large pages at the end of stress tests. Following this email are 12 patches that implement thie page grouping feature. The first patch introduces a mechanism for storing flags related to a whole block of pages. Then allocations are split between movable and all other allocations. Following that are patches to deal with per-cpu pages and make the mechanism configurable. The next patch moves free pages between lists when partially allocated blocks are used for pages of another migrate type. The second last patch groups reclaimable kernel allocations such as inode caches together. The final patch related to groupings keeps high-order atomic allocations. The last two patches are more concerned with control of fragmentation. The second last patch biases placement of non-movable allocations towards the start of memory. This is with a view of supporting memory hot-remove of DIMMs with higher PFNs in the future. The biasing could be enforced a lot heavier but it would cost. The last patch agressively clusters reclaimable pages like inode caches together. The fragmentation reduction strategy needs to track if pages within a block can be moved or reclaimed so that pages are freed to the appropriate list. This patch adds a bitmap for flags affecting a whole a MAX_ORDER block of pages. In non-SPARSEMEM configurations, the bitmap is stored in the struct zone and allocated during initialisation. SPARSEMEM statically allocates the bitmap in a struct mem_section so that bitmaps do not have to be resized during memory hotadd. This wastes a small amount of memory per unused section (usually sizeof(unsigned long)) but the complexity of dynamically allocating the memory is quite high. Additional credit to Andy Whitcroft who reviewed up an earlier implementation of the mechanism an suggested how to make it a *lot* cleaner. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	2007-10-16 09:42:59 -07:00