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 08:25:47 +00:00
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/*
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* Macros for manipulating and testing flags related to a
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* MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES block of pages.
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*
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* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
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* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
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* the Free Software Foundation version 2 of the License
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*
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* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
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* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
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* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
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* GNU General Public License for more details.
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*
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* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
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* along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
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* Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
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*
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* Copyright (C) IBM Corporation, 2006
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*
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* Original author, Mel Gorman
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* Major cleanups and reduction of bit operations, Andy Whitcroft
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*/
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#ifndef PAGEBLOCK_FLAGS_H
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#define PAGEBLOCK_FLAGS_H
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#include <linux/types.h>
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/* Macro to aid the definition of ranges of bits */
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#define PB_range(name, required_bits) \
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name, name ## _end = (name + required_bits) - 1
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/* Bit indices that affect a whole block of pages */
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enum pageblock_bits {
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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 08:25:58 +00:00
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PB_range(PB_migrate, 3), /* 3 bits required for migrate types */
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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 08:25:47 +00:00
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NR_PAGEBLOCK_BITS
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};
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/* Forward declaration */
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struct page;
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/* Declarations for getting and setting flags. See mm/page_alloc.c */
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unsigned long get_pageblock_flags_group(struct page *page,
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int start_bitidx, int end_bitidx);
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void set_pageblock_flags_group(struct page *page, unsigned long flags,
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int start_bitidx, int end_bitidx);
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#define get_pageblock_flags(page) \
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get_pageblock_flags_group(page, 0, NR_PAGEBLOCK_BITS-1)
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#define set_pageblock_flags(page) \
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set_pageblock_flags_group(page, 0, NR_PAGEBLOCK_BITS-1)
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#endif /* PAGEBLOCK_FLAGS_H */
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