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Avoid overflowing of stack during page reclaim V2

PATCH In review Mel Gorman 12 participants 99 messages Jun 14, 2010 – Jun 28, 2010

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Mel Gorman

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cover Avoid overflowing of stack during page reclaim V2

This is a merging of two series - the first of which reduces stack usage in page reclaim and the second which writes contiguous pages during reclaim and avoids writeback in direct reclaimers.

Changelog since V1
o Merge with series that reduces stack usage in page reclaim in general
o Allow memcg to writeback pages as they are not expected to overflow stack
o Drop the contiguous-write patch for the moment

There is a problem in the stack depth usage of page reclaim. Particularly during direct reclaim, it is possible to overflow the stack if it calls into the filesystems writepage function. This patch series aims to trace writebacks so it can be evaulated how many dirty pages are being written, reduce stack usage of page reclaim in general and avoid direct reclaim writing back pages and overflowing the stack.

The first 4 patches are a forward-port of trace points that are partly based on trace points defined by Larry Woodman but never merged. They trace parts of kswapd, direct reclaim, LRU page isolation and page writeback. The tracepoints can be used to evaluate what is happening within reclaim and whether things are getting better or worse. They do not have to be part of the final series but might be useful during discussion and for later regression testing - particularly around the percentage of time spent in reclaim.

The 6 patches after that reduce the stack footprint of page reclaim by moving large allocations out of the main call path. Functionally they should be similar although there is a timing change on when pages get freed exactly. This is aimed at giving filesystems as much stack as possible if kswapd is to writeback pages directly.

Patch 11 puts dirty pages as it finds them onto a temporary list and then writes them all out with a helper function. This simplifies patch 12 and also increases the chances that IO requests can be optimally merged.

Patch 12 prevents direct reclaim writing out pages at all and instead dirty pages are put back on the LRU. For lumpy reclaim, the caller will briefly wait on dirty pages to be written out before trying to reclaim the dirty pages a second time. This increases the responsibility of kswapd somewhat because it's now cleaning pages on behalf of direct reclaimers but kswapd seemed a better fit than background flushers to clean pages as it knows where the pages needing cleaning are. As it's async IO, it should not cause kswapd to stall (at least until the queue is congested) but the order that pages are reclaimed on the LRU is altered. Dirty pages that would have been reclaimed by direct reclaimers are getting another lap on the LRU. The dirty pages could have been put on a dedicated list but this increased counter overhead and the number of lists and it is unclear if it is necessary.

Apologies for the length of the rest of the mail. Measuring the impact of this is not exactly straight-forward.

I ran a number of tests with monitoring on X86, X86-64 and PPC64 and I'll cover what the X86-64 results were here. It's an AMD Phenom 4-core machine with 2G of RAM with a single disk and the onboard IO controller. Dirty ratio was left at 20 (tests with 40 are in progress). The filesystem all the tests were run on was XFS.

Three kernels are compared.

traceonly-v2r5 is the first 4 patches of this series
stackreduce-v2r5 is the first 10 patches of this series
nodirect-v2r5 is all patches in the series

The results on each test is broken up into three parts. The first part compares the results of the test itself. The second part is a report based on the ftrace postprocessing script in patch 4 and reports on direct reclaim and kswapd activity. The third part reports what percentage of time was spent in direct reclaim and kswapd being awake.

To work out the percentage of time spent in direct reclaim, I used /usr/bin/time to get the User + Sys CPU time. The stalled time was taken from the post-processing script. The total time is (User + Sys + Stall) and obviously the percentage is of stalled over total time.

kernbench
=========

traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5

Elapsed min       98.16 ( 0.00%)    97.95 ( 0.21%)    98.25 (-0.09%)
Elapsed mean      98.29 ( 0.00%)    98.26 ( 0.03%)    98.40 (-0.11%)
Elapsed stddev     0.08 ( 0.00%)     0.20 (-165.90%)     0.12 (-59.87%)
Elapsed max       98.34 ( 0.00%)    98.51 (-0.17%)    98.58 (-0.24%)
User    min      311.03 ( 0.00%)   311.74 (-0.23%)   311.13 (-0.03%)
User    mean     311.28 ( 0.00%)   312.45 (-0.38%)   311.42 (-0.05%)
User    stddev     0.24 ( 0.00%)     0.51 (-114.08%)     0.38 (-59.06%)
User    max      311.58 ( 0.00%)   312.94 (-0.44%)   312.06 (-0.15%)
System  min       40.54 ( 0.00%)    39.65 ( 2.20%)    40.34 ( 0.49%)
System  mean      40.80 ( 0.00%)    40.01 ( 1.93%)    40.81 (-0.03%)
System  stddev     0.23 ( 0.00%)     0.34 (-47.57%)     0.29 (-25.47%)
System  max       41.04 ( 0.00%)    40.51 ( 1.29%)    41.11 (-0.17%)
CPU     min      357.00 ( 0.00%)   357.00 ( 0.00%)   357.00 ( 0.00%)
CPU     mean     357.75 ( 0.00%)   358.00 (-0.07%)   357.75 ( 0.00%)
CPU     stddev     0.43 ( 0.00%)     0.71 (-63.30%)     0.43 ( 0.00%)
CPU     max      358.00 ( 0.00%)   359.00 (-0.28%)   358.00 ( 0.00%)

FTrace Reclaim Statistics

                                     traceonly-v2r5  stackreduce-v2r5  nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims                                  0          0          0 
Direct reclaim pages scanned                     0          0          0 
Direct reclaim write async I/O                   0          0          0 
Direct reclaim write sync I/O                    0          0          0 
Wake kswapd requests                             0          0          0 
Kswapd wakeups                                   0          0          0 
Kswapd pages scanned                             0          0          0 
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O                   0          0          0 
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O                    0          0          0 
Time stalled direct reclaim (ms)              0.00       0.00       0.00 
Time kswapd awake (ms)                        0.00       0.00       0.00 

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 2144.58 2146.22 2144.8
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 788.42 794.85 793.66
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%

kernbench is a straight-forward kernel compile. Kernel is built 5 times and and an average taken. There was no interesting difference in terms of performance. As the workload fit easily in memory, there was no page reclaim activity.

IOZone
======
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5

write-64               395452 ( 0.00%)       397208 ( 0.44%)       397796 ( 0.59%)
write-128              463696 ( 0.00%)       460514 (-0.69%)       458940 (-1.04%)
write-256              504861 ( 0.00%)       506050 ( 0.23%)       502969 (-0.38%)
write-512              490875 ( 0.00%)       485767 (-1.05%)       494264 ( 0.69%)
write-1024             497574 ( 0.00%)       489689 (-1.61%)       505956 ( 1.66%)
write-2048             500993 ( 0.00%)       503076 ( 0.41%)       510097 ( 1.78%)
write-4096             504491 ( 0.00%)       502073 (-0.48%)       506993 ( 0.49%)
write-8192             488398 ( 0.00%)       228857 (-113.41%)       313871 (-55.60%)
write-16384            409006 ( 0.00%)       433783 ( 5.71%)       365696 (-11.84%)
write-32768            473136 ( 0.00%)       481153 ( 1.67%)       486373 ( 2.72%)
write-65536            474833 ( 0.00%)       477970 ( 0.66%)       481192 ( 1.32%)
write-131072           429557 ( 0.00%)       452604 ( 5.09%)       459840 ( 6.59%)
write-262144           397934 ( 0.00%)       401955 ( 1.00%)       397479 (-0.11%)
write-524288           222849 ( 0.00%)       230297 ( 3.23%)       209999 (-6.12%)
rewrite-64            1452528 ( 0.00%)      1492919 ( 2.71%)      1452528 ( 0.00%)
rewrite-128           1622919 ( 0.00%)      1618028 (-0.30%)      1663139 ( 2.42%)
rewrite-256           1694118 ( 0.00%)      1704877 ( 0.63%)      1639786 (-3.31%)
rewrite-512           1753325 ( 0.00%)      1740536 (-0.73%)      1730717 (-1.31%)
rewrite-1024          1741104 ( 0.00%)      1787480 ( 2.59%)      1759651 ( 1.05%)
rewrite-2048          1710867 ( 0.00%)      1747411 ( 2.09%)      1747411 ( 2.09%)
rewrite-4096          1583280 ( 0.00%)      1621536 ( 2.36%)      1599942 ( 1.04%)
rewrite-8192          1308005 ( 0.00%)      1338579 ( 2.28%)      1307358 (-0.05%)
rewrite-16384         1293742 ( 0.00%)      1314178 ( 1.56%)      1291602 (-0.17%)
rewrite-32768         1298360 ( 0.00%)      1314503 ( 1.23%)      1276758 (-1.69%)
rewrite-65536         1289212 ( 0.00%)      1316088 ( 2.04%)      1281351 (-0.61%)
rewrite-131072        1286117 ( 0.00%)      1309070 ( 1.75%)      1283007 (-0.24%)
rewrite-262144        1285902 ( 0.00%)      1305816 ( 1.53%)      1274121 (-0.92%)
rewrite-524288         220417 ( 0.00%)       223971 ( 1.59%)       226133 ( 2.53%)
read-64               3203069 ( 0.00%)      2467108 (-29.83%)      3541098 ( 9.55%)
read-128              3759450 ( 0.00%)      4267461 (11.90%)      4233807 (11.20%)
read-256              4264168 ( 0.00%)      4350555 ( 1.99%)      3935921 (-8.34%)
read-512              3437042 ( 0.00%)      3366987 (-2.08%)      3437042 ( 0.00%)
read-1024             3738636 ( 0.00%)      3821805 ( 2.18%)      3735385 (-0.09%)
read-2048             3938881 ( 0.00%)      3984558 ( 1.15%)      3967993 ( 0.73%)
read-4096             3631489 ( 0.00%)      3828122 ( 5.14%)      3781775 ( 3.97%)
read-8192             3175046 ( 0.00%)      3230268 ( 1.71%)      3247058 ( 2.22%)
read-16384            2923635 ( 0.00%)      2869911 (-1.87%)      2954684 ( 1.05%)
read-32768            2819040 ( 0.00%)      2839776 ( 0.73%)      2852152 ( 1.16%)
read-65536            2659324 ( 0.00%)      2827502 ( 5.95%)      2816464 ( 5.58%)
read-131072           2707652 ( 0.00%)      2727534 ( 0.73%)      2746406 ( 1.41%)
read-262144           2765929 ( 0.00%)      2782166 ( 0.58%)      2776125 ( 0.37%)
read-524288           2810803 ( 0.00%)      2822894 ( 0.43%)      2822394 ( 0.41%)
reread-64             5389653 ( 0.00%)      5860307 ( 8.03%)      5735102 ( 6.02%)
reread-128            5122535 ( 0.00%)      5325799 ( 3.82%)      5325799 ( 3.82%)
reread-256            3245838 ( 0.00%)      3285566 ( 1.21%)      3236056 (-0.30%)
reread-512            4340054 ( 0.00%)      4571003 ( 5.05%)      4742616 ( 8.49%)
reread-1024           4265934 ( 0.00%)      4356809 ( 2.09%)      4374559 ( 2.48%)
reread-2048           3915540 ( 0.00%)      4301837 ( 8.98%)      4338776 ( 9.75%)
reread-4096           3846119 ( 0.00%)      3984379 ( 3.47%)      3979764 ( 3.36%)
reread-8192           3257215 ( 0.00%)      3304518 ( 1.43%)      3325949 ( 2.07%)
reread-16384          2959519 ( 0.00%)      2892622 (-2.31%)      2995773 ( 1.21%)
reread-32768          2570835 ( 0.00%)      2607266 ( 1.40%)      2610783 ( 1.53%)
reread-65536          2731466 ( 0.00%)      2683809 (-1.78%)      2691957 (-1.47%)
reread-131072         2738144 ( 0.00%)      2763886 ( 0.93%)      2776056 ( 1.37%)
reread-262144         2781012 ( 0.00%)      2781786 ( 0.03%)      2784322 ( 0.12%)
reread-524288         2787049 ( 0.00%)      2779851 (-0.26%)      2787681 ( 0.02%)
randread-64           1204796 ( 0.00%)      1204796 ( 0.00%)      1143223 (-5.39%)
randread-128          4135958 ( 0.00%)      4012317 (-3.08%)      4135958 ( 0.00%)
randread-256          3454704 ( 0.00%)      3511189 ( 1.61%)      3511189 ( 1.61%)
randread-512          3437042 ( 0.00%)      3366987 (-2.08%)      3437042 ( 0.00%)
randread-1024         3301774 ( 0.00%)      3401130 ( 2.92%)      3403826 ( 3.00%)
randread-2048         3549844 ( 0.00%)      3391470 (-4.67%)      3477979 (-2.07%)
randread-4096         3214912 ( 0.00%)      3261295 ( 1.42%)      3258820 ( 1.35%)
randread-8192         2818958 ( 0.00%)      2836645 ( 0.62%)      2861450 ( 1.48%)
randread-16384        2571662 ( 0.00%)      2515924 (-2.22%)      2564465 (-0.28%)
randread-32768        2319848 ( 0.00%)      2331892 ( 0.52%)      2333594 ( 0.59%)
randread-65536        2288193 ( 0.00%)      2297103 ( 0.39%)      2301123 ( 0.56%)
randread-131072       2270669 ( 0.00%)      2275707 ( 0.22%)      2279150 ( 0.37%)
randread-262144       2258949 ( 0.00%)      2264700 ( 0.25%)      2259975 ( 0.05%)
randread-524288       2250529 ( 0.00%)      2240365 (-0.45%)      2242837 (-0.34%)
randwrite-64           942521 ( 0.00%)       939223 (-0.35%)       939223 (-0.35%)
randwrite-128          962469 ( 0.00%)       971174 ( 0.90%)       969421 ( 0.72%)
randwrite-256          980760 ( 0.00%)       980760 ( 0.00%)       966633 (-1.46%)
randwrite-512         1190529 ( 0.00%)      1138158 (-4.60%)      1040545 (-14.41%)
randwrite-1024        1361836 ( 0.00%)      1361836 ( 0.00%)      1367037 ( 0.38%)
randwrite-2048        1325646 ( 0.00%)      1364390 ( 2.84%)      1361794 ( 2.65%)
randwrite-4096        1360371 ( 0.00%)      1372653 ( 0.89%)      1363935 ( 0.26%)
randwrite-8192        1291680 ( 0.00%)      1305272 ( 1.04%)      1285206 (-0.50%)
randwrite-16384       1253666 ( 0.00%)      1255865 ( 0.18%)      1231889 (-1.77%)
randwrite-32768       1239139 ( 0.00%)      1250641 ( 0.92%)      1224239 (-1.22%)
randwrite-65536       1223186 ( 0.00%)      1228115 ( 0.40%)      1203094 (-1.67%)
randwrite-131072      1207002 ( 0.00%)      1215733 ( 0.72%)      1198229 (-0.73%)
randwrite-262144      1184954 ( 0.00%)      1201542 ( 1.38%)      1179145 (-0.49%)
randwrite-524288        96156 ( 0.00%)        96502 ( 0.36%)        95942 (-0.22%)
bkwdread-64           2923952 ( 0.00%)      3022727 ( 3.27%)      2772930 (-5.45%)
bkwdread-128          3785961 ( 0.00%)      3657016 (-3.53%)      3657016 (-3.53%)
bkwdread-256          3017775 ( 0.00%)      3052087 ( 1.12%)      3159869 ( 4.50%)
bkwdread-512          2875558 ( 0.00%)      2845081 (-1.07%)      2841317 (-1.21%)
bkwdread-1024         3083680 ( 0.00%)      3181915 ( 3.09%)      3140041 ( 1.79%)
bkwdread-2048         3266376 ( 0.00%)      3282603 ( 0.49%)      3281349 ( 0.46%)
bkwdread-4096         3207709 ( 0.00%)      3287506 ( 2.43%)      3248345 ( 1.25%)
bkwdread-8192         2777710 ( 0.00%)      2792156 ( 0.52%)      2777036 (-0.02%)
bkwdread-16384        2565614 ( 0.00%)      2570412 ( 0.19%)      2541795 (-0.94%)
bkwdread-32768        2472332 ( 0.00%)      2495631 ( 0.93%)      2284260 (-8.23%)
bkwdread-65536        2435202 ( 0.00%)      2391036 (-1.85%)      2361477 (-3.12%)
bkwdread-131072       2417850 ( 0.00%)      2453436 ( 1.45%)      2417903 ( 0.00%)
bkwdread-262144       2468467 ( 0.00%)      2491433 ( 0.92%)      2446649 (-0.89%)
bkwdread-524288       2513411 ( 0.00%)      2534789 ( 0.84%)      2486486 (-1.08%)

FTrace Reclaim Statistics

                                  traceonly-v2r5     stackreduce-v2r5  nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims                                  0          0          0 
Direct reclaim pages scanned                     0          0          0 
Direct reclaim write async I/O                   0          0          0 
Direct reclaim write sync I/O                    0          0          0 
Wake kswapd requests                             0          0          0 
Kswapd wakeups                                   0          0          0 
Kswapd pages scanned                             0          0          0 
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O                   0          0          0 
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O                    0          0          0 
Time stalled direct reclaim (ms)              0.00       0.00       0.00 
Time kswapd awake (ms)                        0.00       0.00       0.00 
User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds)         14.54     14.43     14.51
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim         0.00%     0.00%     0.00%

Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 106.39 104.49 107.15
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%

No big surprises in terms of performance. I know there are gains and losses but I've always had trouble getting very stable figures out of IOZone so I find it hard to draw conclusions from them. I should revisit what I'm doing there to see what's wrong.

In terms of reclaim, nothing interesting happened.

SysBench
========

                traceonly-v2r5  stackreduce-v2r5     nodirect-v2r5
           1 11025.01 ( 0.00%) 10249.52 (-7.57%) 10430.57 (-5.70%)
           2  3844.63 ( 0.00%)  4988.95 (22.94%)  4038.95 ( 4.81%)
           3  3210.23 ( 0.00%)  2918.52 (-9.99%)  3113.38 (-3.11%)
           4  1958.91 ( 0.00%)  1987.69 ( 1.45%)  1808.37 (-8.32%)
           5  2864.92 ( 0.00%)  3126.13 ( 8.36%)  2355.70 (-21.62%)
           6  4831.63 ( 0.00%)  3815.67 (-26.63%)  4164.09 (-16.03%)
           7  3788.37 ( 0.00%)  3140.39 (-20.63%)  3471.36 (-9.13%)
           8  2293.61 ( 0.00%)  1636.87 (-40.12%)  1754.25 (-30.75%)

FTrace Reclaim Statistics
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims 9843 13398 51651
Direct reclaim pages scanned 871367 1008709 3080593
Direct reclaim write async I/O 24883 30699 0
Direct reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0
Wake kswapd requests 7070819 6961672 11268341
Kswapd wakeups 1578 1500 943
Kswapd pages scanned 22016558 21779455 17393431
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O 1161346 1101641 1717759
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0
Time stalled direct reclaim (ms) 26.11 45.04 2.97
Time kswapd awake (ms) 5105.06 5135.93 6086.32

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 734.52 712.39 703.9
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 9710.02 9589.20 9334.45
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.06% 0.00% 0.00%

Unlike other sysbench results I post, this is the result of a read/write test. As the machine is under-provisioned for the type of tests, figures are very unstable. For example, for each of the thread counts from 1-8, the test is run a minimum of 5 times. If the estimated mean is not within 1%, it's run up to a maximum of 10 times trying to get a stable average. None of these averages are stable with variances up to 15%. Part of the problem is that larger thread counts push the test into swap as the memory is insufficient. I could tune for this, but it was reclaim that was important.

To illustrate though, here is a graph of total io in comparison to swap io as reported by vmstat. The update frequency was 2 seconds so the IO shown in the graph is about the maximum capacity of the disk for the entire duration of the test with swap kicking in every so often so this was heavily IO bound.

http://www.csn.ul.ie/~mel/postings/nodirect-20100614/totalio-swapio-comparison.ps

The writing back of dirty pages was a factor. It did happen, but it was a negligible portion of the overall IO. For example, with just tracing a total of 97MB or 2% of the pages scanned by direct reclaim was written back and it was all async IO. The time stalled in direct reclaim was negligible although as you'd expect, reduced by not writing back at all.

What is interesting is that kswapd wake requests were raised by direc reclaim not writing back pages. My theory is that it's because the processes are making forward progress meaning they need more memory faster and are not calling congestion_wait as they would have before. kswapd is awake longer as a result of direct reclaim not writing back pages.

Between 5-10% of the pages scanned by kswapd need to be written back based on these three kernels. As the disk was maxed out all of the time, I'm having trouble deciding whether this is "too much IO" or not but I'm leaning towards "no". I'd expect that the flusher was also having time getting IO bandwidth.

Simple Writeback Test
=====================
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims 1923 2394 2683
Direct reclaim pages scanned 246400 252256 282896

Direct reclaim write async I/O                   0          0          0 
Direct reclaim write sync I/O                    0          0          0 
Wake kswapd requests                       1496401    1648245    1709870 
Kswapd wakeups                                1140       1118       1113 
Kswapd pages scanned                      10999585   10982748   10851473 
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O                   0          0       1398 
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O                    0          0          0 

Time stalled direct reclaim (ms) 0.01 0.01 0.01
Time kswapd awake (ms) 293.54 293.68 285.51

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 105.17 102.81 104.34
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 638.75 640.63 639.42
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.04% 0.00% 0.00%

This test starting with 4 threads, doubling the number of threads on each iteration up to 64. Each iteration writes 4*RAM amount of files to disk using dd to dirty memory and conv=fsync to have some sort of stability in the results.

Direc reclaim writeback was not a problem for this test even though a number of pages were scanned so there is no reason not to disable it. kswapd encountered some pages in the "nodirect" kernel but it's likely a timing issue.

Stress HighAlloc
================
stress-highalloc stress-highalloc stress-highalloc
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5

Pass 1          76.00 ( 0.00%)    77.00 ( 1.00%)    70.00 (-6.00%)
Pass 2          78.00 ( 0.00%)    78.00 ( 0.00%)    73.00 (-5.00%)
At Rest         80.00 ( 0.00%)    79.00 (-1.00%)    78.00 (-2.00%)

FTrace Reclaim Statistics
stress-highalloc stress-highalloc stress-highalloc
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims 1245 1247 1369
Direct reclaim pages scanned 180262 177032 164337

Direct reclaim write async I/O               35211      30075          0 
Direct reclaim write sync I/O                17994      13127          0 

Wake kswapd requests 4211 4868 4386
Kswapd wakeups 842 808 739
Kswapd pages scanned 41757111 33360435 9946823
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O 4872154 3154195 791840
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0

Time stalled direct reclaim (ms)           9064.33    7249.29    2868.22 
Time kswapd awake (ms)                     6250.77    4612.99    1937.64 

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 2822.01 2812.45 2629.6
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.10% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 11365.05 9682.00 5210.19
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.02% 0.00% 0.00%

This test builds a large number of kernels simultaneously so that the total workload is 1.5 times the size of RAM. It then attempts to allocate all of RAM as huge pages. The metric is the percentage of memory allocated using load (Pass 1), a second attempt under load (Pass 2) and when the kernel compiles are finishes and the system is quiet (At Rest).

The success figures were comparaible with or without direct reclaim. I know PPC64's success rates are hit a lot worse than this but I think it could be improved in other means than what we have today so I'm less worried about it.

Unlike the other tests, synchronous direct writeback is a factor in this test because of lumpy reclaim. This increases the stall time of a lumpy reclaimer by quite a margin. Compare the "Time stalled direct reclaim" between the vanilla and nodirect kernel - the nodirect kernel is stalled less than a third of the time. Interestingly, the time kswapd is stalled is significantly reduced as well and overall, the test completes a lot faster.

Whether this is because of improved IO patterns or just because lumpy reclaim stalling on synchronous IO is a bad idea, I'm not sure but either way, the patch looks like a good idea from the perspective of this test.

Based on this series of tests at least, there appears to be good reasons for preventing direct reclaim writing back pages and it does not appear we are currently spending a lot of our time in writeback. It remains to be seen if it's still true with dirty ratio is higher (e.g. 40) or the amount of available memory differs (e.g. 256MB) but the trace points and post-processing script can be used to help figure it out.

Comments?

KOSAKI Motohiro (2):
vmscan: kill prev_priority completely
vmscan: simplify shrink_inactive_list()

Mel Gorman (11):
tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for kswapd wakeup, sleeping and
direct reclaim
tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for LRU page isolation tracing, vmscan: Add trace event when a page is written tracing, vmscan: Add a postprocessing script for reclaim-related
ftrace events
vmscan: Remove unnecessary temporary vars in do_try_to_free_pages
vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_inactive_list()
vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_page_list()
vmscan: Update isolated page counters outside of main path in
shrink_inactive_list()
vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch
vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim
fix: script formatting

 .../trace/postprocess/trace-vmscan-postprocess.pl  |  623 ++++++++++++++++++++
 include/linux/mmzone.h                             |   15 -
 include/trace/events/gfpflags.h                    |   37 ++
 include/trace/events/kmem.h                        |   38 +--
 include/trace/events/vmscan.h                      |  184 ++++++
 mm/page_alloc.c                                    |    2 -
 mm/vmscan.c                                        |  622 ++++++++++++--------
 mm/vmstat.c                                        |    2 -
 8 files changed, 1223 insertions(+), 300 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/trace/postprocess/trace-vmscan-postprocess.pl
 create mode 100644 include/trace/events/gfpflags.h
 create mode 100644 include/trace/events/vmscan.h

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#1 lore raw

PATCH 1/12 tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for kswapd wakeup, sleeping and direct reclaim

This patch adds two trace events for kswapd waking up and going asleep for the purposes of tracking kswapd activity and two trace events for direct reclaim beginning and ending. The information can be used to work out how much time a process or the system is spending on the reclamation of pages and in the case of direct reclaim, how many pages were reclaimed for that process. High frequency triggering of these events could point to memory pressure problems.

---
 include/trace/events/gfpflags.h |   37 +++++++++++++
 include/trace/events/kmem.h     |   38 +-------------
 include/trace/events/vmscan.h   |  115 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 mm/vmscan.c                     |   24 +++++++--
 4 files changed, 173 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 include/trace/events/gfpflags.h
 create mode 100644 include/trace/events/vmscan.h
include/trace/events/gfpflags.h new file +37 -0
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3615c0
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+/*
+ * The order of these masks is important. Matching masks will be seen
+ * first and the left over flags will end up showing by themselves.
+ *
+ * For example, if we have GFP_KERNEL before GFP_USER we wil get:
+ *
+ *  GFP_KERNEL|GFP_HARDWALL
+ *
+ * Thus most bits set go first.
+ */
+#define show_gfp_flags(flags)						\
+	(flags) ? __print_flags(flags, "|",				\
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE,	"GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE"}, \
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_HIGHUSER,		"GFP_HIGHUSER"},	\
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_USER,		"GFP_USER"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_TEMPORARY,		"GFP_TEMPORARY"},	\
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_KERNEL,		"GFP_KERNEL"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_NOFS,		"GFP_NOFS"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_ATOMIC,		"GFP_ATOMIC"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)GFP_NOIO,		"GFP_NOIO"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_HIGH,		"GFP_HIGH"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_WAIT,		"GFP_WAIT"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_IO,		"GFP_IO"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_COLD,		"GFP_COLD"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NOWARN,		"GFP_NOWARN"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_REPEAT,		"GFP_REPEAT"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NOFAIL,		"GFP_NOFAIL"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NORETRY,		"GFP_NORETRY"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_COMP,		"GFP_COMP"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_ZERO,		"GFP_ZERO"},		\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NOMEMALLOC,	"GFP_NOMEMALLOC"},	\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_HARDWALL,		"GFP_HARDWALL"},	\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_THISNODE,		"GFP_THISNODE"},	\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_RECLAIMABLE,	"GFP_RECLAIMABLE"},	\
+	{(unsigned long)__GFP_MOVABLE,		"GFP_MOVABLE"}		\
+	) : "GFP_NOWAIT"
+
include/trace/events/kmem.h +1 -37
index 3adca0c..a9c87ad 100644
@@ -6,43 +6,7 @@
 
 #include <linux/types.h>
 #include <linux/tracepoint.h>
-
-/*
- * The order of these masks is important. Matching masks will be seen
- * first and the left over flags will end up showing by themselves.
- *
- * For example, if we have GFP_KERNEL before GFP_USER we wil get:
- *
- *  GFP_KERNEL|GFP_HARDWALL
- *
- * Thus most bits set go first.
- */
-#define show_gfp_flags(flags)						\
-	(flags) ? __print_flags(flags, "|",				\
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE,	"GFP_HIGHUSER_MOVABLE"}, \
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_HIGHUSER,		"GFP_HIGHUSER"},	\
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_USER,		"GFP_USER"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_TEMPORARY,		"GFP_TEMPORARY"},	\
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_KERNEL,		"GFP_KERNEL"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_NOFS,		"GFP_NOFS"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_ATOMIC,		"GFP_ATOMIC"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)GFP_NOIO,		"GFP_NOIO"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_HIGH,		"GFP_HIGH"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_WAIT,		"GFP_WAIT"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_IO,		"GFP_IO"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_COLD,		"GFP_COLD"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NOWARN,		"GFP_NOWARN"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_REPEAT,		"GFP_REPEAT"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NOFAIL,		"GFP_NOFAIL"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NORETRY,		"GFP_NORETRY"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_COMP,		"GFP_COMP"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_ZERO,		"GFP_ZERO"},		\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_NOMEMALLOC,	"GFP_NOMEMALLOC"},	\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_HARDWALL,		"GFP_HARDWALL"},	\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_THISNODE,		"GFP_THISNODE"},	\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_RECLAIMABLE,	"GFP_RECLAIMABLE"},	\
-	{(unsigned long)__GFP_MOVABLE,		"GFP_MOVABLE"}		\
-	) : "GFP_NOWAIT"
+#include "gfpflags.h"
 
 DECLARE_EVENT_CLASS(kmem_alloc,
 
include/trace/events/vmscan.h new file +115 -0

115 lines not on this page · raw message

mm/vmscan.c +20 -4
index 9c7e57c..6bfb579 100644
@@ -48,6 +48,9 @@
 
 #include "internal.h"
 
+#define CREATE_TRACE_POINTS
+#include <trace/events/vmscan.h>
+
 struct scan_control {
 	/* Incremented by the number of inactive pages that were scanned */
 	unsigned long nr_scanned;
@@ -1886,6 +1889,7 @@ out:
 unsigned long try_to_free_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist, int order,
 				gfp_t gfp_mask, nodemask_t *nodemask)
 {
+	unsigned long nr_reclaimed;
 	struct scan_control sc = {
 		.gfp_mask = gfp_mask,
 		.may_writepage = !laptop_mode,
@@ -1898,7 +1902,15 @@ unsigned long try_to_free_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist, int order,
 		.nodemask = nodemask,
 	};
 
-	return do_try_to_free_pages(zonelist, &sc);
+	trace_mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_begin(order,
+				sc.may_writepage,
+				gfp_mask);
+
+	nr_reclaimed = do_try_to_free_pages(zonelist, &sc);
+
+	trace_mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_end(nr_reclaimed);
+
+	return nr_reclaimed;
 }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR
@@ -2297,9 +2309,10 @@ static int kswapd(void *p)
 				 * premature sleep. If not, then go fully
 				 * to sleep until explicitly woken up
 				 */
-				if (!sleeping_prematurely(pgdat, order, remaining))
+				if (!sleeping_prematurely(pgdat, order, remaining)) {
+					trace_mm_vmscan_kswapd_sleep(pgdat->node_id);
 					schedule();
-				else {
+				} else {
 					if (remaining)
 						count_vm_event(KSWAPD_LOW_WMARK_HIT_QUICKLY);
 					else
@@ -2319,8 +2332,10 @@ static int kswapd(void *p)
 		 * We can speed up thawing tasks if we don't call balance_pgdat
 		 * after returning from the refrigerator
 		 */
-		if (!ret)
+		if (!ret) {
+			trace_mm_vmscan_kswapd_wake(pgdat->node_id, order);
 			balance_pgdat(pgdat, order);
+		}
 	}
 	return 0;
 }
@@ -2340,6 +2355,7 @@ void wakeup_kswapd(struct zone *zone, int order)
 		return;
 	if (pgdat->kswapd_max_order < order)
 		pgdat->kswapd_max_order = order;
+	trace_mm_vmscan_wakeup_kswapd(pgdat->node_id, zone_idx(zone), order);
 	if (!cpuset_zone_allowed_hardwall(zone, GFP_KERNEL))
 		return;
 	if (!waitqueue_active(&pgdat->kswapd_wait))
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Acked-by on v1 1/12
#2 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 01/12] tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for kswapd wakeup, sleeping and direct reclaim

Quoted 9 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds two trace events for kswapd waking up and going asleep for the purposes of tracking kswapd activity and two trace events for direct reclaim beginning and ending. The information can be used to work out how much time a process or the system is spending on the reclamation of pages and in the case of direct reclaim, how many pages were reclaimed for that process. High frequency triggering of these events could point to memory pressure problems.

Signature · 7 lines
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Acked-by on v1 1/12
#3 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 01/12] tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for kswapd wakeup, sleeping and direct reclaim

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 9 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds two trace events for kswapd waking up and going asleep for the purposes of tracking kswapd activity and two trace events for direct reclaim beginning and ending. The information can be used to work out how much time a process or the system is spending on the reclamation of pages and in the case of direct reclaim, how many pages were reclaimed for that process. High frequency triggering of these events could point to memory pressure problems.

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author
#4 lore raw

PATCH 2/12 tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for LRU page isolation

In reply to Mel Gorman

This patch adds an event for when pages are isolated en-masse from the LRU lists. This event augments the information available on LRU traffic and can be used to evaluate lumpy reclaim.

---
 include/trace/events/vmscan.h |   46 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 mm/vmscan.c                   |   14 ++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 60 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
include/trace/events/vmscan.h +46 -0
index f76521f..a331454 100644
@@ -109,6 +109,52 @@ TRACE_EVENT(mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_end,
 	TP_printk("nr_reclaimed=%lu", __entry->nr_reclaimed)
 );
 
+TRACE_EVENT(mm_vmscan_lru_isolate,
+
+	TP_PROTO(int order,
+		unsigned long nr_requested,
+		unsigned long nr_scanned,
+		unsigned long nr_taken,
+		unsigned long nr_lumpy_taken,
+		unsigned long nr_lumpy_dirty,
+		unsigned long nr_lumpy_failed,
+		int isolate_mode),
+
+	TP_ARGS(order, nr_requested, nr_scanned, nr_taken, nr_lumpy_taken, nr_lumpy_dirty, nr_lumpy_failed, isolate_mode),
+
+	TP_STRUCT__entry(
+		__field(int, order)
+		__field(unsigned long, nr_requested)
+		__field(unsigned long, nr_scanned)
+		__field(unsigned long, nr_taken)
+		__field(unsigned long, nr_lumpy_taken)
+		__field(unsigned long, nr_lumpy_dirty)
+		__field(unsigned long, nr_lumpy_failed)
+		__field(int, isolate_mode)
+	),
+
+	TP_fast_assign(
+		__entry->order = order;
+		__entry->nr_requested = nr_requested;
+		__entry->nr_scanned = nr_scanned;
+		__entry->nr_taken = nr_taken;
+		__entry->nr_lumpy_taken = nr_lumpy_taken;
+		__entry->nr_lumpy_dirty = nr_lumpy_dirty;
+		__entry->nr_lumpy_failed = nr_lumpy_failed;
+		__entry->isolate_mode = isolate_mode;
+	),
+
+	TP_printk("isolate_mode=%d order=%d nr_requested=%lu nr_scanned=%lu nr_taken=%lu contig_taken=%lu contig_dirty=%lu contig_failed=%lu",
+		__entry->isolate_mode,
+		__entry->order,
+		__entry->nr_requested,
+		__entry->nr_scanned,
+		__entry->nr_taken,
+		__entry->nr_lumpy_taken,
+		__entry->nr_lumpy_dirty,
+		__entry->nr_lumpy_failed)
+);
+		
 #endif /* _TRACE_VMSCAN_H */
 
 /* This part must be outside protection */
mm/vmscan.c +14 -0
index 6bfb579..25bf05a 100644
@@ -917,6 +917,7 @@ static unsigned long isolate_lru_pages(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 		unsigned long *scanned, int order, int mode, int file)
 {
 	unsigned long nr_taken = 0;
+	unsigned long nr_lumpy_taken = 0, nr_lumpy_dirty = 0, nr_lumpy_failed = 0;
 	unsigned long scan;
 
 	for (scan = 0; scan < nr_to_scan && !list_empty(src); scan++) {
@@ -994,12 +995,25 @@ static unsigned long isolate_lru_pages(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 				list_move(&cursor_page->lru, dst);
 				mem_cgroup_del_lru(cursor_page);
 				nr_taken++;
+				nr_lumpy_taken++;
+				if (PageDirty(cursor_page))
+					nr_lumpy_dirty++;
 				scan++;
+			} else {
+				if (mode == ISOLATE_BOTH &&
+						page_count(cursor_page))
+					nr_lumpy_failed++;
 			}
 		}
 	}
 
 	*scanned = scan;
+
+	trace_mm_vmscan_lru_isolate(order, 
+			nr_to_scan, scan,
+			nr_taken,
+			nr_lumpy_taken, nr_lumpy_dirty, nr_lumpy_failed,
+			mode);
 	return nr_taken;
 }
 
Signature · 7 lines
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Acked-by on v1 2/12
#5 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 02/12] tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for LRU page isolation

Quoted 5 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds an event for when pages are isolated en-masse from the LRU lists. This event augments the information available on LRU traffic and can be used to evaluate lumpy reclaim.

Signature · 7 lines
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Acked-by on v1 2/12
#6 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 02/12] tracing, vmscan: Add trace events for LRU page isolation

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 5 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds an event for when pages are isolated en-masse from the LRU lists. This event augments the information available on LRU traffic and can be used to evaluate lumpy reclaim.

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author
#7 lore raw

PATCH 3/12 tracing, vmscan: Add trace event when a page is written

In reply to Mel Gorman

This patch adds a trace event for when page reclaim queues a page for IO and records whether it is synchronous or asynchronous. Excessive synchronous IO for a process can result in noticeable stalls during direct reclaim. Excessive IO from page reclaim may indicate that the system is seriously under provisioned for the amount of dirty pages that exist.

---
 include/trace/events/vmscan.h |   23 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 mm/vmscan.c                   |    2 ++
 2 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
include/trace/events/vmscan.h +23 -0
index a331454..b26daa9 100644
@@ -154,6 +154,29 @@ TRACE_EVENT(mm_vmscan_lru_isolate,
 		__entry->nr_lumpy_dirty,
 		__entry->nr_lumpy_failed)
 );
+
+TRACE_EVENT(mm_vmscan_writepage,
+
+	TP_PROTO(struct page *page,
+		int sync_io),
+
+	TP_ARGS(page, sync_io),
+
+	TP_STRUCT__entry(
+		__field(struct page *, page)
+		__field(int, sync_io)
+	),
+
+	TP_fast_assign(
+		__entry->page = page;
+		__entry->sync_io = sync_io;
+	),
+
+	TP_printk("page=%p pfn=%lu sync_io=%d",
+		__entry->page,
+		page_to_pfn(__entry->page),
+		__entry->sync_io)
+);
 		
 #endif /* _TRACE_VMSCAN_H */
 
mm/vmscan.c +2 -0
index 25bf05a..58527c4 100644
@@ -399,6 +399,8 @@ static pageout_t pageout(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
 			/* synchronous write or broken a_ops? */
 			ClearPageReclaim(page);
 		}
+		trace_mm_vmscan_writepage(page,
+			sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC);
 		inc_zone_page_state(page, NR_VMSCAN_WRITE);
 		return PAGE_SUCCESS;
 	}
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Acked-by on v1 3/12
#8 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 03/12] tracing, vmscan: Add trace event when a page is written

Quoted 7 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds a trace event for when page reclaim queues a page for IO and records whether it is synchronous or asynchronous. Excessive synchronous IO for a process can result in noticeable stalls during direct reclaim. Excessive IO from page reclaim may indicate that the system is seriously under provisioned for the amount of dirty pages that exist.

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Acked-by on v1 3/12
#9 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 03/12] tracing, vmscan: Add trace event when a page is written

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 7 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds a trace event for when page reclaim queues a page for IO and records whether it is synchronous or asynchronous. Excessive synchronous IO for a process can result in noticeable stalls during direct reclaim. Excessive IO from page reclaim may indicate that the system is seriously under provisioned for the amount of dirty pages that exist.

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author
#10 lore raw

PATCH 4/12 tracing, vmscan: Add a postprocessing script for reclaim-related ftrace events

In reply to Mel Gorman

This patch adds a simple post-processing script for the reclaim-related trace events. It can be used to give an indication of how much traffic there is on the LRU lists and how severe latencies due to reclaim are. Example output looks like the following

Reclaim latencies expressed as order-latency_in_ms
uname-3942 9-200.179000000004 9-98.7900000000373 9-99.8330000001006

kswapd0-311            0-662.097999999998 0-2.79700000002049 \
	0-149.100000000035 0-3295.73600000003 0-9806.31799999997 0-35528.833 \
	0-10043.197 0-129740.979 0-3.50500000000466 0-3.54899999999907 \
	0-9297.78999999992 0-3.48499999998603 0-3596.97999999998 0-3.92799999995623 \
	0-3.35000000009313 0-16729.017 0-3.57799999997951 0-47435.0630000001 \
	0-3.7819999998901 0-5864.06999999995 0-18635.334 0-10541.289 9-186011.565 \
	9-3680.86300000001 9-1379.06499999994 9-958571.115 9-66215.474 \
	9-6721.14699999988 9-1962.15299999993 9-1094806.125 9-2267.83199999994 \
	9-47120.9029999999 9-427653.886 9-2.6359999999404 9-632.148999999976 \
	9-476.753000000026 9-495.577000000048 9-8.45900000003166 9-6.6820000000298 \
	9-1.30500000016764 9-251.746000000043 9-383.905000000028 9-80.1419999999925 \
	9-281.160000000149 9-14.8780000000261 9-381.45299999998 9-512.07799999998 \
	9-49.5519999999087 9-167.439000000013 9-183.820999999996 9-239.527999999933 \
	9-19.9479999998584 9-148.747999999905 9-164.583000000101 9-16.9480000000913 \
	9-192.376000000164 9-64.1010000000242 9-1.40800000005402 9-3.60800000000745 \
	9-17.1359999999404 9-4.69500000006519 9-2.06400000001304 9-1582488.554 \
	9-6244.19499999983 9-348153.812 9-2.0999999998603 9-0.987999999895692 \
	0-32218.473 0-1.6140000000596 0-1.28100000019185 0-1.41300000017509 \
	0-1.32299999985844 0-602.584000000032 0-1.34400000004098 0-1.6929999999702 \
	1-22101.8190000001 9-174876.724 9-16.2420000000857 9-175.165999999736 \
	9-15.8589999997057 9-0.604999999981374 9-3061.09000000032 9-479.277000000235 \
	9-1.54499999992549 9-771.985000000335 9-4.88700000010431 9-15.0649999999441 \
	9-0.879999999888241 9-252.01500000013 9-1381.03600000031 9-545.689999999944 \
	9-3438.0129999998 9-3343.70099999988
bench-stresshig-3942   9-7063.33900000004 9-129960.482 9-2062.27500000002 \
	9-3845.59399999992 9-171.82799999998 9-16493.821 9-7615.23900000006 \
	9-10217.848 9-983.138000000035 9-2698.39999999991 9-4016.1540000001 \
	9-5522.37700000009 9-21630.429 \
	9-15061.048 9-10327.953 9-542.69700000016 9-317.652000000002 \
	9-8554.71699999995 9-1786.61599999992 9-1899.31499999994 9-2093.41899999999 \
	9-4992.62400000007 9-942.648999999976 9-1923.98300000001 9-3.7980000001844 \
	9-5.99899999983609 9-0.912000000011176 9-1603.67700000014 9-1.98300000000745 \
	9-3.96500000008382 9-0.902999999932945 9-2802.72199999983 9-1078.24799999991 \
	9-2155.82900000014 9-10.058999999892 9-1984.723 9-1687.97999999998 \
	9-1136.05300000007 9-3183.61699999985 9-458.731000000145 9-6.48600000003353 \
	9-1013.25200000009 9-8415.22799999989 9-10065.584 9-2076.79600000009 \
	9-3792.65699999989 9-71.2010000001173 9-2560.96999999997 9-2260.68400000012 \
	9-2862.65799999982 9-1255.81500000018 9-15.7440000001807 9-4.33499999996275 \
	9-1446.63800000004 9-238.635000000009 9-60.1790000000037 9-4.38800000003539 \
	9-639.567000000039 9-306.698000000091 9-31.4070000001229 9-74.997999999905 \
	9-632.725999999791 9-1625.93200000003 9-931.266000000061 9-98.7749999999069 \
	9-984.606999999844 9-225.638999999966 9-421.316000000108 9-653.744999999879 \
	9-572.804000000004 9-769.158999999985 9-603.918000000063 9-4.28499999991618 \
	9-626.21399999992 9-1721.25 9-0.854999999981374 9-572.39599999995 \
	9-681.881999999983 9-1345.12599999993 9-363.666999999899 9-3823.31099999999 \
	9-2991.28200000012 9-4.27099999994971 9-309.76500000013 9-3068.35700000008 \
	9-788.25 9-3515.73999999999 9-2065.96100000013 9-286.719999999972 \
	9-316.076000000117 9-344.151000000071 9-2.51000000000931 9-306.688000000082 \
	9-1515.00099999993 9-336.528999999864 9-793.491999999853 9-457.348999999929 \
	9-13620.155 9-119.933999999892 9-35.0670000000391 9-918.266999999993 \
	9-828.569000000134 9-4863.81099999999 9-105.222000000067 9-894.23900000006 \
	9-110.964999999851 9-0.662999999942258 9-12753.3150000002 9-12.6129999998957 \
	9-13368.0899999999 9-12.4199999999255 9-1.00300000002608 9-1.41100000008009 \
	9-10300.5290000001 9-16.502000000095 9-30.7949999999255 9-6283.0140000002 \
	9-4320.53799999994 9-6826.27300000004 9-3.07299999985844 9-1497.26799999992 \
	9-13.4040000000969 9-3.12999999988824 9-3.86100000003353 9-11.3539999998175 \
	9-0.10799999977462 9-21.780999999959 9-209.695999999996 9-299.647000000114 \
	9-6.01699999999255 9-20.8349999999627 9-22.5470000000205 9-5470.16800000006 \
	9-7.60499999998137 9-0.821000000229105 9-1.56600000010803 9-14.1669999998994 \
	9-0.209000000031665 9-1.82300000009127 9-1.70000000018626 9-19.9429999999702 \
	9-124.266999999993 9-0.0389999998733401 9-6.71400000015274 9-16.7710000001825 \
	9-31.0409999999683 9-0.516999999992549 9-115.888000000035 9-5.19900000002235 \
	9-222.389999999898 9-11.2739999999758 9-80.9050000000279 9-8.14500000001863 \
	9-4.44599999999627 9-0.218999999808148 9-0.715000000083819 9-0.233000000007451
\
	9-48.2630000000354 9-248.560999999987 9-374.96800000011 9-644.179000000004 \
	9-0.835999999893829 9-79.0060000000522 9-128.447999999858 9-0.692000000039116 \
	9-5.26500000013039 9-128.449000000022 9-2.04799999995157 9-12.0990000001621 \
	9-8.39899999997579 9-10.3860000001732 9-11.9310000000987 9-53.4450000000652 \
	9-0.46999999997206 9-2.96299999998882 9-17.9699999999721 9-0.776000000070781 \
	9-25.2919999998994 9-33.1110000000335 9-0.434000000124797 9-0.641000000061467 \
	9-0.505000000121072 9-1.12800000002608 9-149.222000000067 9-1.17599999997765 \
	9-3247.33100000001 9-10.7439999999478 9-153.523000000045 9-1.38300000014715 \
	9-794.762000000104 9-3.36199999996461 9-128.765999999829 9-181.543999999994 \
	9-78149.8229999999 9-176.496999999974 9-89.9940000001807 9-9.12700000009499 \
	9-250.827000000048 9-0.224999999860302 9-0.388999999966472 9-1.16700000036508 \
	9-32.1740000001155 9-12.6800000001676 9-0.0720000001601875 9-0.274999999906868
\
	9-0.724000000394881 9-266.866000000387 9-45.5709999999963 9-4.54399999976158 \
	9-8.27199999988079 9-4.38099999958649 9-0.512000000104308 9-0.0640000002458692
\
	9-5.20000000018626 9-0.0839999997988343 9-12.816000000108 9-0.503000000026077 \
	9-0.507999999914318 9-6.23999999975786 9-3.35100000025705 9-18.8530000001192 \
	9-25.2220000000671 9-68.2309999996796 9-98.9939999999478 9-0.441000000108033 \
	9-4.24599999981001 9-261.702000000048 9-3.01599999982864 9-0.0749999997206032 \
	9-0.0370000000111759 9-4.375 9-3.21800000034273 9-11.3960000001825 \
	9-0.0540000000037253 9-0.286000000312924 9-0.865999999921769 \
	9-0.294999999925494 9-6.45999999996275 9-4.31099999975413 9-128.248999999836 \
	9-0.282999999821186 9-102.155000000261 9-0.0860000001266599 \
	9-0.0540000000037253 9-0.935000000055879 9-0.0670000002719462 \
	9-5.8640000000596 9-19.9860000000335 9-4.18699999991804 9-0.566000000108033 \
	9-2.55099999997765 9-0.702000000048429 9-131.653999999631 9-0.638999999966472 \
	9-14.3229999998584 9-183.398000000045 9-178.095999999903 9-3.22899999981746 \
	9-7.31399999978021 9-22.2400000002235 9-11.7979999999516 9-108.10599999968 \
	9-99.0159999998286 9-102.640999999829 9-38.414000000339
Process                  Direct     Wokeup      Pages      Pages    Pages
details                   Rclms     Kswapd    Scanned    Sync-IO ASync-IO
cc1-30800                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-24260                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-24152                     0         12          0          0        0      wakeup-0=12
cc1-8139                      0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-4390                      0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-4648                      0          7          0          0        0      wakeup-0=7
cc1-4552                      0          3          0          0        0      wakeup-0=3
dd-4550                       0         31          0          0        0      wakeup-0=31
date-4898                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-6549                      0          7          0          0        0      wakeup-0=7
as-22202                      0         17          0          0        0      wakeup-0=17
cc1-6495                      0          9          0          0        0      wakeup-0=9
cc1-8299                      0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-6009                      0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-2574                      0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
cc1-30568                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-2679                      0          6          0          0        0      wakeup-0=6
sh-13747                      0         12          0          0        0      wakeup-0=12
cc1-22193                     0         18          0          0        0      wakeup-0=18
cc1-30725                     0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
as-4392                       0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
cc1-28180                     0         14          0          0        0      wakeup-0=14
cc1-13697                     0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
cc1-22207                     0          8          0          0        0      wakeup-0=8
cc1-15270                     0        179          0          0        0      wakeup-0=179
cc1-22011                     0         82          0          0        0      wakeup-0=82
cp-14682                      0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
as-11926                      0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
cc1-6016                      0          5          0          0        0      wakeup-0=5
make-18554                    0         13          0          0        0      wakeup-0=13
cc1-8292                      0         12          0          0        0      wakeup-0=12
make-24381                    0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-1=1
date-18681                    0         33          0          0        0      wakeup-0=33
cc1-32276                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
timestamp-outpu-2809          0        253          0          0        0      wakeup-0=240 wakeup-1=13
date-18624                    0          7          0          0        0      wakeup-0=7
cc1-30960                     0          9          0          0        0      wakeup-0=9
cc1-4014                      0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-30706                     0         22          0          0        0      wakeup-0=22
uname-3942                    4          1        306          0       17      direct-9=4       wakeup-9=1
cc1-28207                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-30563                     0          9          0          0        0      wakeup-0=9
cc1-22214                     0         10          0          0        0      wakeup-0=10
cc1-28221                     0         11          0          0        0      wakeup-0=11
cc1-28123                     0          6          0          0        0      wakeup-0=6
kswapd0-311                   0          7     357302          0    34233      wakeup-0=7
cc1-5988                      0          7          0          0        0      wakeup-0=7
as-30734                      0        161          0          0        0      wakeup-0=161
cc1-22004                     0         45          0          0        0      wakeup-0=45
date-4590                     0          4          0          0        0      wakeup-0=4
cc1-15279                     0        213          0          0        0      wakeup-0=213
date-30735                    0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-30583                     0          4          0          0        0      wakeup-0=4
cc1-32324                     0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
cc1-23933                     0          3          0          0        0      wakeup-0=3
cc1-22001                     0         36          0          0        0      wakeup-0=36
bench-stresshig-3942        287        287      80186       6295    12196      direct-9=287       wakeup-9=287
cc1-28170                     0          7          0          0        0      wakeup-0=7
date-7932                     0         92          0          0        0      wakeup-0=92
cc1-22222                     0          6          0          0        0      wakeup-0=6
cc1-32334                     0         16          0          0        0      wakeup-0=16
cc1-2690                      0          6          0          0        0      wakeup-0=6
cc1-30733                     0          9          0          0        0      wakeup-0=9
cc1-32298                     0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
cc1-13743                     0         18          0          0        0      wakeup-0=18
cc1-22186                     0          4          0          0        0      wakeup-0=4
cc1-28214                     0         11          0          0        0      wakeup-0=11
cc1-13735                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
updatedb-8173                 0         18          0          0        0      wakeup-0=18
cc1-13750                     0          3          0          0        0      wakeup-0=3
cat-2808                      0          2          0          0        0      wakeup-0=2
cc1-15277                     0        169          0          0        0      wakeup-0=169
date-18317                    0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1
cc1-15274                     0        197          0          0        0      wakeup-0=197
cc1-30732                     0          1          0          0        0      wakeup-0=1

Kswapd Kswapd Order Pages Pages Pages
Instance Wakeups Re-wakeup Scanned Sync-IO ASync-IO
kswapd0-311 91 24 357302 0 34233 wake-0=31 wake-1=1 wake-9=59 rewake-0=10 rewake-1=1 rewake-9=13

Summary
Direct reclaims: 291
Direct reclaim pages scanned: 437794
Direct reclaim write sync I/O: 6295
Direct reclaim write async I/O: 46446
Wake kswapd requests: 2152
Time stalled direct reclaim: 519.163009000002 ms

Kswapd wakeups: 91
Kswapd pages scanned: 357302
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O: 0
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O: 34233
Time kswapd awake: 5282.749757 ms

---
 .../trace/postprocess/trace-vmscan-postprocess.pl  |  654 ++++++++++++++++++++
 1 files changed, 654 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/trace/postprocess/trace-vmscan-postprocess.pl
Documentation/trace/postprocess/trace-vmscan-postprocess.pl new file +654 -0
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b48d968
@@ -0,0 +1,654 @@
+#!/usr/bin/perl
+# This is a POC for reading the text representation of trace output related to
+# page reclaim. It makes an attempt to extract some high-level information on
+# what is going on. The accuracy of the parser may vary
+#
+# Example usage: trace-vmscan-postprocess.pl < /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace_pipe
+# other options
+#   --read-procstat	If the trace lacks process info, get it from /proc
+#   --ignore-pid	Aggregate processes of the same name together
+#
+# Copyright (c) IBM Corporation 2009
+# Author: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
+use strict;
+use Getopt::Long;
+
+# Tracepoint events
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN	=> 1;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_END	=> 2;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE		=> 3;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_SLEEP		=> 4;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_LRU_SHRINK_ACTIVE	=> 5;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_LRU_SHRINK_INACTIVE	=> 6;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_LRU_ISOLATE		=> 7;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC		=> 8;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC		=> 9;
+use constant EVENT_UNKNOWN			=> 10;
+
+# Per-order events
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN_PERORDER => 11;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD_PERORDER 	=> 12;
+use constant MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE_PERORDER	=> 13;
+use constant HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP_PERORDER	=> 14;
+
+# Constants used to track state
+use constant STATE_DIRECT_BEGIN 		=> 15;
+use constant STATE_DIRECT_ORDER 		=> 16;
+use constant STATE_KSWAPD_BEGIN			=> 17;
+use constant STATE_KSWAPD_ORDER			=> 18;
+
+# High-level events extrapolated from tracepoints
+use constant HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY	=> 19;
+use constant HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY		=> 20;
+use constant HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP		=> 21;
+use constant HIGH_NR_SCANNED			=> 22;
+use constant HIGH_NR_TAKEN			=> 23;
+use constant HIGH_NR_RECLAIM			=> 24;
+use constant HIGH_NR_CONTIG_DIRTY		=> 25;
+
+my %perprocesspid;
+my %perprocess;
+my %last_procmap;
+my $opt_ignorepid;
+my $opt_read_procstat;
+
+my $total_wakeup_kswapd;
+my ($total_direct_reclaim, $total_direct_nr_scanned);
+my ($total_direct_latency, $total_kswapd_latency);
+my ($total_direct_writepage_sync, $total_direct_writepage_async);
+my ($total_kswapd_nr_scanned, $total_kswapd_wake);
+my ($total_kswapd_writepage_sync, $total_kswapd_writepage_async);
+
+# Catch sigint and exit on request
+my $sigint_report = 0;
+my $sigint_exit = 0;
+my $sigint_pending = 0;
+my $sigint_received = 0;
+sub sigint_handler {
+	my $current_time = time;
+	if ($current_time - 2 > $sigint_received) {
+		print "SIGINT received, report pending. Hit ctrl-c again to exit\n";
+		$sigint_report = 1;
+	} else {
+		if (!$sigint_exit) {
+			print "Second SIGINT received quickly, exiting\n";
+		}
+		$sigint_exit++;
+	}
+
+	if ($sigint_exit > 3) {
+		print "Many SIGINTs received, exiting now without report\n";
+		exit;
+	}
+
+	$sigint_received = $current_time;
+	$sigint_pending = 1;
+}
+$SIG{INT} = "sigint_handler";
+
+# Parse command line options
+GetOptions(
+	'ignore-pid'	 =>	\$opt_ignorepid,
+	'read-procstat'	 =>	\$opt_read_procstat,
+);
+
+# Defaults for dynamically discovered regex's
+my $regex_direct_begin_default = 'order=([0-9]*) may_writepage=([0-9]*) gfp_flags=([A-Z_|]*)';
+my $regex_direct_end_default = 'nr_reclaimed=([0-9]*)';
+my $regex_kswapd_wake_default = 'nid=([0-9]*) order=([0-9]*)';
+my $regex_kswapd_sleep_default = 'nid=([0-9]*)';
+my $regex_wakeup_kswapd_default = 'nid=([0-9]*) zid=([0-9]*) order=([0-9]*)';
+my $regex_lru_isolate_default = 'isolate_mode=([0-9]*) order=([0-9]*) nr_requested=([0-9]*) nr_scanned=([0-9]*) nr_taken=([0-9]*) contig_taken=([0-9]*) contig_dirty=([0-9]*) contig_failed=([0-9]*)';
+my $regex_lru_shrink_inactive_default = 'lru=([A-Z_]*) nr_scanned=([0-9]*) nr_reclaimed=([0-9]*) priority=([0-9]*)';
+my $regex_lru_shrink_active_default = 'lru=([A-Z_]*) nr_scanned=([0-9]*) nr_rotated=([0-9]*) priority=([0-9]*)';
+my $regex_writepage_default = 'page=([0-9a-f]*) pfn=([0-9]*) sync_io=([0-9]*)';
+
+# Dyanically discovered regex
+my $regex_direct_begin;
+my $regex_direct_end;
+my $regex_kswapd_wake;
+my $regex_kswapd_sleep;
+my $regex_wakeup_kswapd;
+my $regex_lru_isolate;
+my $regex_lru_shrink_inactive;
+my $regex_lru_shrink_active;
+my $regex_writepage;
+
+# Static regex used. Specified like this for readability and for use with /o
+#                      (process_pid)     (cpus      )   ( time  )   (tpoint    ) (details)
+my $regex_traceevent = '\s*([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)\s*(\[[0-9]*\])\s*([0-9.]*):\s*([a-zA-Z_]*):\s*(.*)';
+my $regex_statname = '[-0-9]*\s\((.*)\).*';
+my $regex_statppid = '[-0-9]*\s\(.*\)\s[A-Za-z]\s([0-9]*).*';
+
+sub generate_traceevent_regex {
+	my $event = shift;
+	my $default = shift;
+	my $regex;
+
+	# Read the event format or use the default
+	if (!open (FORMAT, "/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events/$event/format")) {
+		print("WARNING: Event $event format string not found\n");
+		return $default;
+	} else {
+		my $line;
+		while (!eof(FORMAT)) {
+			$line = <FORMAT>;
+			$line =~ s/, REC->.*//;
+			if ($line =~ /^print fmt:\s"(.*)".*/) {
+				$regex = $1;
+				$regex =~ s/%s/\([0-9a-zA-Z|_]*\)/g;
+				$regex =~ s/%p/\([0-9a-f]*\)/g;
+				$regex =~ s/%d/\([-0-9]*\)/g;
+				$regex =~ s/%ld/\([-0-9]*\)/g;
+				$regex =~ s/%lu/\([0-9]*\)/g;
+			}
+		}
+	}
+
+	# Can't handle the print_flags stuff but in the context of this
+	# script, it really doesn't matter
+	$regex =~ s/\(REC.*\) \? __print_flags.*//;
+
+	# Verify fields are in the right order
+	my $tuple;
+	foreach $tuple (split /\s/, $regex) {
+		my ($key, $value) = split(/=/, $tuple);
+		my $expected = shift;
+		if ($key ne $expected) {
+			print("WARNING: Format not as expected for event $event '$key' != '$expected'\n");
+			$regex =~ s/$key=\((.*)\)/$key=$1/;
+		}
+	}
+
+	if (defined shift) {
+		die("Fewer fields than expected in format");
+	}
+
+	return $regex;
+}
+
+$regex_direct_begin = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_begin",
+			$regex_direct_begin_default,
+			"order", "may_writepage",
+			"gfp_flags");
+$regex_direct_end = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_end",
+			$regex_direct_end_default,
+			"nr_reclaimed");
+$regex_kswapd_wake = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_kswapd_wake",
+			$regex_kswapd_wake_default,
+			"nid", "order");
+$regex_kswapd_sleep = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_kswapd_sleep",
+			$regex_kswapd_sleep_default,
+			"nid");
+$regex_wakeup_kswapd = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_wakeup_kswapd",
+			$regex_wakeup_kswapd_default,
+			"nid", "zid", "order");
+$regex_lru_isolate = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_lru_isolate",
+			$regex_lru_isolate_default,
+			"isolate_mode", "order",
+			"nr_requested", "nr_scanned", "nr_taken",
+			"contig_taken", "contig_dirty", "contig_failed");
+$regex_lru_shrink_inactive = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_lru_shrink_inactive",
+			$regex_lru_shrink_inactive_default,
+			"nid", "zid",
+			"lru",
+			"nr_scanned", "nr_reclaimed", "priority");
+$regex_lru_shrink_active = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_lru_shrink_active",
+			$regex_lru_shrink_active_default,
+			"nid", "zid",
+			"lru",
+			"nr_scanned", "nr_rotated", "priority");
+$regex_writepage = generate_traceevent_regex(
+			"vmscan/mm_vmscan_writepage",
+			$regex_writepage_default,
+			"page", "pfn", "sync_io");
+
+sub read_statline($) {
+	my $pid = $_[0];
+	my $statline;
+
+	if (open(STAT, "/proc/$pid/stat")) {
+		$statline = <STAT>;
+		close(STAT);
+	}
+
+	if ($statline eq '') {
+		$statline = "-1 (UNKNOWN_PROCESS_NAME) R 0";
+	}
+
+	return $statline;
+}
+
+sub guess_process_pid($$) {
+	my $pid = $_[0];
+	my $statline = $_[1];
+
+	if ($pid == 0) {
+		return "swapper-0";
+	}
+
+	if ($statline !~ /$regex_statname/o) {
+		die("Failed to math stat line for process name :: $statline");
+	}
+	return "$1-$pid";
+}
+
+# Convert sec.usec timestamp format
+sub timestamp_to_ms($) {
+	my $timestamp = $_[0];
+
+	my ($sec, $usec) = split (/\./, $timestamp);
+	return ($sec * 1000) + ($usec / 1000);
+}
+
+sub process_events {
+	my $traceevent;
+	my $process_pid;
+	my $cpus;
+	my $timestamp;
+	my $tracepoint;
+	my $details;
+	my $statline;
+
+	# Read each line of the event log
+EVENT_PROCESS:
+	while ($traceevent = <STDIN>) {
+		if ($traceevent =~ /$regex_traceevent/o) {
+			$process_pid = $1;
+			$timestamp = $3;
+			$tracepoint = $4;
+
+			$process_pid =~ /(.*)-([0-9]*)$/;
+			my $process = $1;
+			my $pid = $2;
+
+			if ($process eq "") {
+				$process = $last_procmap{$pid};
+				$process_pid = "$process-$pid";
+			}
+			$last_procmap{$pid} = $process;
+
+			if ($opt_read_procstat) {
+				$statline = read_statline($pid);
+				if ($opt_read_procstat && $process eq '') {
+					$process_pid = guess_process_pid($pid, $statline);
+				}
+			}
+		} else {
+			next;
+		}
+
+		# Perl Switch() sucks majorly
+		if ($tracepoint eq "mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_begin") {
+			$timestamp = timestamp_to_ms($timestamp);
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN}++;
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_DIRECT_BEGIN} = $timestamp;
+
+			$details = $5;
+			if ($details !~ /$regex_direct_begin/o) {
+				print "WARNING: Failed to parse mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_begin as expected\n";
+				print "         $details\n";
+				print "         $regex_direct_begin\n";
+				next;
+			}
+			my $order = $1;
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN_PERORDER}[$order]++;
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_DIRECT_ORDER} = $order;
+		} elsif ($tracepoint eq "mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_end") {
+			# Count the event itself
+			my $index = $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_END};
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_END}++;
+
+			# Record how long direct reclaim took this time
+			if (defined $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_DIRECT_BEGIN}) {
+				$timestamp = timestamp_to_ms($timestamp);
+				my $order = $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_DIRECT_ORDER};
+				my $latency = ($timestamp - $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_DIRECT_BEGIN});
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$index] = "$order-$latency";
+			}
+		} elsif ($tracepoint eq "mm_vmscan_kswapd_wake") {
+			$details = $5;
+			if ($details !~ /$regex_kswapd_wake/o) {
+				print "WARNING: Failed to parse mm_vmscan_kswapd_wake as expected\n";
+				print "         $details\n";
+				print "         $regex_kswapd_wake\n";
+				next;
+			}
+
+			my $order = $2;
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_KSWAPD_ORDER} = $order;
+			if (!$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_KSWAPD_BEGIN}) {
+				$timestamp = timestamp_to_ms($timestamp);
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE}++;
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_KSWAPD_BEGIN} = $timestamp;
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE_PERORDER}[$order]++;
+			} else {
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP}++;
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP_PERORDER}[$order]++;
+			}
+		} elsif ($tracepoint eq "mm_vmscan_kswapd_sleep") {
+
+			# Count the event itself
+			my $index = $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_SLEEP};
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_SLEEP}++;
+
+			# Record how long kswapd was awake
+			$timestamp = timestamp_to_ms($timestamp);
+			my $order = $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_KSWAPD_ORDER};
+			my $latency = ($timestamp - $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_KSWAPD_BEGIN});
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[$index] = "$order-$latency";
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{STATE_KSWAPD_BEGIN} = 0;
+		} elsif ($tracepoint eq "mm_vmscan_wakeup_kswapd") {
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD}++;
+
+			$details = $5;
+			if ($details !~ /$regex_wakeup_kswapd/o) {
+				print "WARNING: Failed to parse mm_vmscan_wakeup_kswapd as expected\n";
+				print "         $details\n";
+				print "         $regex_wakeup_kswapd\n";
+				next;
+			}
+			my $order = $3;
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD_PERORDER}[$order]++;
+		} elsif ($tracepoint eq "mm_vmscan_lru_isolate") {
+			$details = $5;
+			if ($details !~ /$regex_lru_isolate/o) {
+				print "WARNING: Failed to parse mm_vmscan_lru_isolate as expected\n";
+				print "         $details\n";
+				print "         $regex_lru_isolate/o\n";
+				next;
+			}
+			my $nr_scanned = $4;
+			my $nr_contig_dirty = $7;
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_SCANNED} += $nr_scanned;
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_CONTIG_DIRTY} += $nr_contig_dirty;
+		} elsif ($tracepoint eq "mm_vmscan_writepage") {
+			$details = $5;
+			if ($details !~ /$regex_writepage/o) {
+				print "WARNING: Failed to parse mm_vmscan_writepage as expected\n";
+				print "         $details\n";
+				print "         $regex_writepage\n";
+				next;
+			}
+
+			my $sync_io = $3;
+			if ($sync_io) {
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC}++;
+			} else {
+				$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC}++;
+			}
+		} else {
+			$perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{EVENT_UNKNOWN}++;
+		}
+
+		if ($sigint_pending) {
+			last EVENT_PROCESS;
+		}
+	}
+}
+
+sub dump_stats {
+	my $hashref = shift;
+	my %stats = %$hashref;
+
+	# Dump per-process stats
+	my $process_pid;
+	my $max_strlen = 0;
+
+	# Get the maximum process name
+	foreach $process_pid (keys %perprocesspid) {
+		my $len = length($process_pid);
+		if ($len > $max_strlen) {
+			$max_strlen = $len;
+		}
+	}
+	$max_strlen += 2;
+
+	# Work out latencies
+	printf("\n") if !$opt_ignorepid;
+	printf("Reclaim latencies expressed as order-latency_in_ms\n") if !$opt_ignorepid;
+	foreach $process_pid (keys %stats) {
+
+		if (!$stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[0] &&
+				!$stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[0]) {
+			next;
+		}
+
+		printf "%-" . $max_strlen . "s ", $process_pid if !$opt_ignorepid;
+		my $index = 0;
+		while (defined $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$index] ||
+			defined $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[$index]) {
+
+			if ($stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$index]) { 
+				printf("%s ", $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$index]) if !$opt_ignorepid;
+				my ($dummy, $latency) = split(/-/, $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$index]);
+				$total_direct_latency += $latency;
+			} else {
+				printf("%s ", $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[$index]) if !$opt_ignorepid;
+				my ($dummy, $latency) = split(/-/, $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[$index]);
+				$total_kswapd_latency += $latency;
+			}
+			$index++;
+		}
+		print "\n" if !$opt_ignorepid;
+	}
+
+	# Print out process activity
+	printf("\n");
+	printf("%-" . $max_strlen . "s %8s %10s   %8s   %8s %8s %8s %8s\n", "Process", "Direct",  "Wokeup", "Pages",   "Pages",   "Pages",     "Time");
+	printf("%-" . $max_strlen . "s %8s %10s   %8s   %8s %8s %8s %8s\n", "details", "Rclms",   "Kswapd", "Scanned", "Sync-IO", "ASync-IO",  "Stalled");
+	foreach $process_pid (keys %stats) {
+
+		if (!$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN}) {
+			next;
+		}
+
+		$total_direct_reclaim += $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN};
+		$total_wakeup_kswapd += $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD};
+		$total_direct_nr_scanned += $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_SCANNED};
+		$total_direct_writepage_sync += $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC};
+		$total_direct_writepage_async += $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC};
+
+		my $index = 0;
+		my $this_reclaim_delay = 0;
+		while (defined $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$index]) {
+			 my ($dummy, $latency) = split(/-/, $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$index]);
+			$this_reclaim_delay += $latency;
+			$index++;
+		}
+
+		printf("%-" . $max_strlen . "s %8d %10d   %8u   %8u %8u %8.3f",
+			$process_pid,
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_SCANNED},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC},
+			$this_reclaim_delay / 1000);
+
+		if ($stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN}) {
+			print "      ";
+			for (my $order = 0; $order < 20; $order++) {
+				my $count = $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN_PERORDER}[$order];
+				if ($count != 0) {
+					print "direct-$order=$count ";
+				}
+			}
+		}
+		if ($stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD}) {
+			print "      ";
+			for (my $order = 0; $order < 20; $order++) {
+				my $count = $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD_PERORDER}[$order];
+				if ($count != 0) {
+					print "wakeup-$order=$count ";
+				}
+			}
+		}
+		if ($stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_CONTIG_DIRTY}) {
+			print "      ";
+			my $count = $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_CONTIG_DIRTY};
+			if ($count != 0) {
+				print "contig-dirty=$count ";
+			}
+		}
+
+		print "\n";
+	}
+
+	# Print out kswapd activity
+	printf("\n");
+	printf("%-" . $max_strlen . "s %8s %10s   %8s   %8s %8s %8s\n", "Kswapd",   "Kswapd",  "Order",     "Pages",   "Pages",  "Pages");
+	printf("%-" . $max_strlen . "s %8s %10s   %8s   %8s %8s %8s\n", "Instance", "Wakeups", "Re-wakeup", "Scanned", "Sync-IO", "ASync-IO");
+	foreach $process_pid (keys %stats) {
+
+		if (!$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE}) {
+			next;
+		}
+
+		$total_kswapd_wake += $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE};
+		$total_kswapd_nr_scanned += $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_SCANNED};
+		$total_kswapd_writepage_sync += $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC};
+		$total_kswapd_writepage_async += $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC};
+
+		printf("%-" . $max_strlen . "s %8d %10d   %8u   %8i %8u",
+			$process_pid,
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_SCANNED},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC},
+			$stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC});
+
+		if ($stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE}) {
+			print "      ";
+			for (my $order = 0; $order < 20; $order++) {
+				my $count = $stats{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE_PERORDER}[$order];
+				if ($count != 0) {
+					print "wake-$order=$count ";
+				}
+			}
+		}
+		if ($stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP}) {
+			print "      ";
+			for (my $order = 0; $order < 20; $order++) {
+				my $count = $stats{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP_PERORDER}[$order];
+				if ($count != 0) {
+					print "rewake-$order=$count ";
+				}
+			}
+		}
+		printf("\n");
+	}
+
+	# Print out summaries
+	$total_direct_latency /= 1000;
+	$total_kswapd_latency /= 1000;
+	print "\nSummary\n";
+	print "Direct reclaims:     		$total_direct_reclaim\n";
+	print "Direct reclaim pages scanned:	$total_direct_nr_scanned\n";
+	print "Direct reclaim write sync I/O:	$total_direct_writepage_sync\n";
+	print "Direct reclaim write async I/O:	$total_direct_writepage_async\n";
+	print "Wake kswapd requests:		$total_wakeup_kswapd\n";
+	printf "Time stalled direct reclaim: 	%-1.2f ms\n", $total_direct_latency;
+	print "\n";
+	print "Kswapd wakeups:			$total_kswapd_wake\n";
+	print "Kswapd pages scanned:		$total_kswapd_nr_scanned\n";
+	print "Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O:	$total_kswapd_writepage_sync\n";
+	print "Kswapd reclaim write async I/O:	$total_kswapd_writepage_async\n";
+	printf "Time kswapd awake:		%-1.2f ms\n", $total_kswapd_latency;
+}
+
+sub aggregate_perprocesspid() {
+	my $process_pid;
+	my $process;
+	undef %perprocess;
+
+	foreach $process_pid (keys %perprocesspid) {
+		$process = $process_pid;
+		$process =~ s/-([0-9])*$//;
+		if ($process eq '') {
+			$process = "NO_PROCESS_NAME";
+		}
+
+		$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN} += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN};
+		$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE} += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE};
+		$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD} += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD};
+		$perprocess{$process}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP} += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_REWAKEUP};
+		$perprocess{$process}->{HIGH_NR_SCANNED} += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_NR_SCANNED};
+		$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC} += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_SYNC};
+		$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC} += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WRITEPAGE_ASYNC};
+
+		for (my $order = 0; $order < 20; $order++) {
+			$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN_PERORDER}[$order] += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_BEGIN_PERORDER}[$order];
+			$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD_PERORDER}[$order] += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_WAKEUP_KSWAPD_PERORDER}[$order];
+			$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE_PERORDER}[$order] += $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_WAKE_PERORDER}[$order];
+
+		}
+
+		# Aggregate direct reclaim latencies
+		my $wr_index = $perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_END};
+		my $rd_index = 0;
+		while (defined $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$rd_index]) {
+			$perprocess{$process}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$wr_index] = $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_DIRECT_RECLAIM_LATENCY}[$rd_index];
+			$rd_index++;
+			$wr_index++;
+		}
+		$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_END} = $wr_index;
+
+		# Aggregate kswapd latencies
+		my $wr_index = $perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_KSWAPD_SLEEP};
+		my $rd_index = 0;
+		while (defined $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[$rd_index]) {
+			$perprocess{$process}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[$wr_index] = $perprocesspid{$process_pid}->{HIGH_KSWAPD_LATENCY}[$rd_index];
+			$rd_index++;
+			$wr_index++;
+		}
+		$perprocess{$process}->{MM_VMSCAN_DIRECT_RECLAIM_END} = $wr_index;
+	}
+}
+
+sub report() {
+	if (!$opt_ignorepid) {
+		dump_stats(\%perprocesspid);
+	} else {
+		aggregate_perprocesspid();
+		dump_stats(\%perprocess);
+	}
+}
+
+# Process events or signals until neither is available
+sub signal_loop() {
+	my $sigint_processed;
+	do {
+		$sigint_processed = 0;
+		process_events();
+
+		# Handle pending signals if any
+		if ($sigint_pending) {
+			my $current_time = time;
+
+			if ($sigint_exit) {
+				print "Received exit signal\n";
+				$sigint_pending = 0;
+			}
+			if ($sigint_report) {
+				if ($current_time >= $sigint_received + 2) {
+					report();
+					$sigint_report = 0;
+					$sigint_pending = 0;
+					$sigint_processed = 1;
+				}
+			}
+		}
+	} while ($sigint_pending || $sigint_processed);
+}
+
+signal_loop();
+report();
Signature · 7 lines
1.7.1

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Acked-by on v1 4/12
#11 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 04/12] tracing, vmscan: Add a postprocessing script for reclaim-related ftrace events

Quoted 4 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds a simple post-processing script for the reclaim-related trace events. It can be used to give an indication of how much traffic there is on the LRU lists and how severe latencies due to reclaim are. Example output looks like the following

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All rights reversed

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Acked-by on v1 4/12
#12 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 04/12] tracing, vmscan: Add a postprocessing script for reclaim-related ftrace events

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 3 lines · Mel Gorman

This patch adds a simple post-processing script for the reclaim-related trace events. It can be used to give an indication of how much traffic there is on the LRU lists and how severe latencies due to reclaim are.

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author
#13 lore raw

PATCH 5/12 vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

In reply to Mel Gorman

From: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>

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.

---
 include/linux/mmzone.h |   15 ------------
 mm/page_alloc.c        |    2 -
 mm/vmscan.c            |   57 ------------------------------------------------
 mm/vmstat.c            |    2 -
 4 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 76 deletions(-)
include/linux/mmzone.h +0 -15
index b4d109e..b578eee 100644
@@ -348,21 +348,6 @@ struct zone {
 	atomic_long_t		vm_stat[NR_VM_ZONE_STAT_ITEMS];
 
 	/*
-	 * prev_priority holds the scanning priority for this zone.  It is
-	 * defined as the scanning priority at which we achieved our reclaim
-	 * target at the previous try_to_free_pages() or balance_pgdat()
-	 * invocation.
-	 *
-	 * We use prev_priority as a measure of how much stress page reclaim is
-	 * under - it drives the swappiness decision: whether to unmap mapped
-	 * pages.
-	 *
-	 * Access to both this field is quite racy even on uniprocessor.  But
-	 * it is expected to average out OK.
-	 */
-	int prev_priority;
-
-	/*
 	 * The target ratio of ACTIVE_ANON to INACTIVE_ANON pages on
 	 * this zone's LRU.  Maintained by the pageout code.
 	 */
mm/page_alloc.c +0 -2
index 431214b..0b0b629 100644
@@ -4081,8 +4081,6 @@ static void __paginginit free_area_init_core(struct pglist_data *pgdat,
 		zone_seqlock_init(zone);
 		zone->zone_pgdat = pgdat;
 
-		zone->prev_priority = DEF_PRIORITY;
-
 		zone_pcp_init(zone);
 		for_each_lru(l) {
 			INIT_LIST_HEAD(&zone->lru[l].list);
mm/vmscan.c +0 -57

108 lines not on this page · raw message

mm/vmstat.c +0 -2
index 7759941..5c0b1b6 100644
@@ -853,11 +853,9 @@ static void zoneinfo_show_print(struct seq_file *m, pg_data_t *pgdat,
 	}
 	seq_printf(m,
 		   "\n  all_unreclaimable: %u"
-		   "\n  prev_priority:     %i"
 		   "\n  start_pfn:         %lu"
 		   "\n  inactive_ratio:    %u",
 		   zone->all_unreclaimable,
-		   zone->prev_priority,
 		   zone->zone_start_pfn,
 		   zone->inactive_ratio);
 	seq_putc(m, '\n');
Signature · 7 lines
1.7.1

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Reviewed-by on v1 5/12
#14 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 05/12] vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

Quoted 5 lines · Mel Gorman

From: KOSAKI Motohiro<[email protected]>

Since 2.6.28 zone->prev_priority is unused. Then it can be removed safely. It reduce stack usage slightly.

Quoted 7 lines

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.

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#15 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 05/12] vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 8 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:46 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

From: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>

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.

This would have been badder in earlier days when we were using the scanning priority to decide when to start unmapping pte-mapped pages - page reclaim would have been recirculating large blobs of mapped pages around the LRU until the priority had built to the level where we started to unmap them.

However that priority-based decision got removed and right now I don't recall what it got replaced with. Aren't we now unmapping pages way too early and suffering an increased major&minor fault rate? Worried.

Things which are still broken after we broke prev_priority:

- If page reclaim is having a lot of trouble, prev_priority would have permitted do_try_to_free_pages() to call disable_swap_token() earlier on. As things presently stand, we'll do a lot of thrash-detection stuff before (presumably correctly) dropping the swap token.

So. What's up with that? I don't even remember _why_ we disable the swap token once the scanning priority gets severe and the code comments there are risible. And why do we wait until priority==0 rather than priority==1?

- Busted prev_priority means that lumpy reclaim will act oddly. Every time someone goes into do some recalim, they'll start out not doing lumpy reclaim. Then, after a while, they'll get a clue and will start doing the lumpy thing. Then they return from reclaim and the next recalim caller will again forget that he should have done lumpy reclaim.

I dunno what the effects of this are in the real world, but it seems dumb.

And one has to wonder: if we're making these incorrect decisions based upon a bogus view of the current scanning difficulty, why are these various priority-based thresholding heuristics even in there? Are they doing anything useful?

So.. either we have a load of useless-crap-and-cruft in there which should be lopped out, or we don't have a load of useless-crap-and-cruft in there, and we should fix prev_priority.

Quoted 8 lines
---
 include/linux/mmzone.h |   15 ------------
 mm/page_alloc.c        |    2 -
 mm/vmscan.c            |   57 ------------------------------------------------
 mm/vmstat.c            |    2 -

The patch forgot to remove mem_cgroup_get_reclaim_priority() and friends.

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#16 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 05/12] vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

Quoted 9 lines · Andrew Morton

This would have been badder in earlier days when we were using the scanning priority to decide when to start unmapping pte-mapped pages - page reclaim would have been recirculating large blobs of mapped pages around the LRU until the priority had built to the level where we started to unmap them.

However that priority-based decision got removed and right now I don't recall what it got replaced with. Aren't we now unmapping pages way too early and suffering an increased major&minor fault rate? Worried.

We keep a different set of statistics to decide whether to reclaim only page cache pages, or both page cache and anonymous pages. The function get_scan_ratio parses those statistics.

Quoted 4 lines

So. What's up with that? I don't even remember _why_ we disable the swap token once the scanning priority gets severe and the code comments there are risible. And why do we wait until priority==0 rather than priority==1?

The reason is that we never page out the pages belonging to the process owning the swap token (with the exception of that process evicting its own pages).

If that process has a really large RSS in the current zone, and we are having problems freeing pages, it may be beneficial to also evict pages from that process.

Now that the LRU lists are split out into file backed and swap backed, it may be a lot easier to find pages to evict. That may mean we could notice we're getting into trouble at much higher priority levels and disable the swap token at a higher priority level.

I do not believe prev_priority will be very useful here, since we'd like to start out with small scans whenever possible.

Quoted 6 lines

- Busted prev_priority means that lumpy reclaim will act oddly. Every time someone goes into do some recalim, they'll start out not doing lumpy reclaim. Then, after a while, they'll get a clue and will start doing the lumpy thing. Then they return from reclaim and the next recalim caller will again forget that he should have done lumpy reclaim.

How common are lumpy reclaims, anyway?

Isn't it more likely that in-between every two higher-order reclaims, a number of order zero reclaims will be happening?

In that case, the prev_priority logic may have introduced the kind of behavioural bug you describe above...

Quoted 4 lines

And one has to wonder: if we're making these incorrect decisions based upon a bogus view of the current scanning difficulty, why are these various priority-based thresholding heuristics even in there? Are they doing anything useful?

The prev_priority code was useful when we had filesystem and swap backed pages mixed on the same LRU list.

I am not convinced it still has any use.

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#17 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 05/12] vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

Quoted 8 lines · On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:45:29 -0400 Rik van Riel <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 6 lines · Andrew Morton

This would have been badder in earlier days when we were using the scanning priority to decide when to start unmapping pte-mapped pages - page reclaim would have been recirculating large blobs of mapped pages around the LRU until the priority had built to the level where we started to unmap them.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 3 lines

However that priority-based decision got removed and right now I don't recall what it got replaced with. Aren't we now unmapping pages way too early and suffering an increased major&minor fault rate? Worried.

We keep a different set of statistics to decide whether to reclaim only page cache pages, or both page cache and anonymous pages. The function get_scan_ratio parses those statistics.

I wasn't talking about anon-vs-file. I was referring to mapped-file versus not-mapped file. If the code sees a mapped page come off the tail of the LRU it'll just unmap and reclaim the thing. This policy caused awful amounts of paging activity when someone started doing lots of read() activity, which is why the VM was changed to value mapped pagecache higher than unmapped pagecache. Did this biasing get retained and if so, how?

Quoted 13 lines
Quoted 4 lines

So. What's up with that? I don't even remember _why_ we disable the swap token once the scanning priority gets severe and the code comments there are risible. And why do we wait until priority==0 rather than priority==1?

The reason is that we never page out the pages belonging to the process owning the swap token (with the exception of that process evicting its own pages).

If that process has a really large RSS in the current zone, and we are having problems freeing pages, it may be beneficial to also evict pages from that process.

Quoted 5 lines

Now that the LRU lists are split out into file backed and swap backed, it may be a lot easier to find pages to evict. That may mean we could notice we're getting into trouble at much higher priority levels and disable the swap token at a higher priority level.

hm, lots of "may"s there.

Does thrash-avoidance actually still work?

Quoted 2 lines

I do not believe prev_priority will be very useful here, since we'd like to start out with small scans whenever possible.

Why?

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 6 lines

- Busted prev_priority means that lumpy reclaim will act oddly. Every time someone goes into do some recalim, they'll start out not doing lumpy reclaim. Then, after a while, they'll get a clue and will start doing the lumpy thing. Then they return from reclaim and the next recalim caller will again forget that he should have done lumpy reclaim.

How common are lumpy reclaims, anyway?

A lot more than they should be, I suspect, given the recent trend towards asking for higher-order allocations. Kernel developers should be prohibited from using more than 512M of RAM.

Quoted 2 lines

Isn't it more likely that in-between every two higher-order reclaims, a number of order zero reclaims will be happening?

Sounds likely, yes. Need prev_priority[DEF_PRIORITY], sigh.

Quoted 10 lines

In that case, the prev_priority logic may have introduced the kind of behavioural bug you describe above...

Quoted 4 lines

And one has to wonder: if we're making these incorrect decisions based upon a bogus view of the current scanning difficulty, why are these various priority-based thresholding heuristics even in there? Are they doing anything useful?

The prev_priority code was useful when we had filesystem and swap backed pages mixed on the same LRU list.

No, stop saying swap! ;)

It's all to do with mapped pagecache versus unmapped pagecache. "ytf does my browser get paged out all the time".

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#18 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 05/12] vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

Quoted 20 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 8 lines · On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:45:29 -0400 Rik van Riel<[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 6 lines · Andrew Morton

This would have been badder in earlier days when we were using the scanning priority to decide when to start unmapping pte-mapped pages - page reclaim would have been recirculating large blobs of mapped pages around the LRU until the priority had built to the level where we started to unmap them.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 3 lines

However that priority-based decision got removed and right now I don't recall what it got replaced with. Aren't we now unmapping pages way too early and suffering an increased major&minor fault rate? Worried.

We keep a different set of statistics to decide whether to reclaim only page cache pages, or both page cache and anonymous pages. The function get_scan_ratio parses those statistics.

Quoted 7 lines

I wasn't talking about anon-vs-file. I was referring to mapped-file versus not-mapped file. If the code sees a mapped page come off the tail of the LRU it'll just unmap and reclaim the thing. This policy caused awful amounts of paging activity when someone started doing lots of read() activity, which is why the VM was changed to value mapped pagecache higher than unmapped pagecache. Did this biasing get retained and if so, how?

It changed a little, but we still have it:

1) we do not deactivate active file pages if the active file list is smaller than the inactive file list - this protects the working set from streaming IO

2) we keep mapped referenced executable pages on the active file list if they got accessed while on the active list, while other file pages get deactivated unconditionally

Quoted 1 line

Does thrash-avoidance actually still work?

I suspect it does, but I have not actually tested that code in years :)

Quoted 4 lines
Quoted 2 lines

I do not believe prev_priority will be very useful here, since we'd like to start out with small scans whenever possible.

Why?

For one, memory sizes today are a lot larger than they were when 2.6.0 came out.

Secondly, we now know more exactly what is on each LRU list. That should greatly reduce unnecessary turnover of the list.

For example, if we know there is no swap space available, we will not bother scanning the anon LRU lists.

If we know there is not enough file cache left to get us up to the zone high water mark, we will not bother scanning the few remaining file pages.

Because of those simple checks (in get_scan_priority), I do not expect that we will have to scan through all of memory as frequently as we had to do in 2.6.0.

Furthermore, we unconditionally deactivate most active pages and have a working used-once scheme for pages on the anon lists. This should also contribute to a reduction in the number of pages that get scanned.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 8 lines

In that case, the prev_priority logic may have introduced the kind of behavioural bug you describe above...

Quoted 4 lines

And one has to wonder: if we're making these incorrect decisions based upon a bogus view of the current scanning difficulty, why are these various priority-based thresholding heuristics even in there? Are they doing anything useful?

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 2 lines

The prev_priority code was useful when we had filesystem and swap backed pages mixed on the same LRU list.

No, stop saying swap! ;)

It's all to do with mapped pagecache versus unmapped pagecache. "ytf does my browser get paged out all the time".

We have other measures in place now to protect the working set on the file LRU lists (see above). We are able to have those measures in the kernel because we no longer have mixed LRU lists.

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#19 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 05/12] vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

In reply to Andrew Morton

sorry for the long delay.
(and I'm a bit wonder why I was not CCed this thread ;)

Quoted 46 lines
Quoted 8 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:46 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

From: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>

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.

This would have been badder in earlier days when we were using the scanning priority to decide when to start unmapping pte-mapped pages - page reclaim would have been recirculating large blobs of mapped pages around the LRU until the priority had built to the level where we started to unmap them.

However that priority-based decision got removed and right now I don't recall what it got replaced with. Aren't we now unmapping pages way too early and suffering an increased major&minor fault rate? Worried.

Things which are still broken after we broke prev_priority:

- If page reclaim is having a lot of trouble, prev_priority would have permitted do_try_to_free_pages() to call disable_swap_token() earlier on. As things presently stand, we'll do a lot of thrash-detection stuff before (presumably correctly) dropping the swap token.

So. What's up with that? I don't even remember _why_ we disable the swap token once the scanning priority gets severe and the code comments there are risible. And why do we wait until priority==0 rather than priority==1?

- Busted prev_priority means that lumpy reclaim will act oddly. Every time someone goes into do some recalim, they'll start out not doing lumpy reclaim. Then, after a while, they'll get a clue and will start doing the lumpy thing. Then they return from reclaim and the next recalim caller will again forget that he should have done lumpy reclaim.

I dunno what the effects of this are in the real world, but it seems dumb.

Quoted 8 lines

And one has to wonder: if we're making these incorrect decisions based upon a bogus view of the current scanning difficulty, why are these various priority-based thresholding heuristics even in there? Are they doing anything useful?

So.. either we have a load of useless-crap-and-cruft in there which should be lopped out, or we don't have a load of useless-crap-and-cruft in there, and we should fix prev_priority.

May I explain my experience? I'd like to explain why prev_priority wouldn't works nowadays.

First of all, Yes, 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's 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.

And, I don't think lumpy reclaim threshold is big matter, because It was introduced to case aim7 corner case issue. I don't think such situation will occur frequently in the real workload. thus end users can't observe such logic.

For mapped-vs-unmapped thing, I dunnno the exactly reason. That was introduced by Rik, unfortunatelly I had not joined its activity at making design time. I can only say, while my testing the current code works good.

That said, my conclusion is opposite. For long term view, we should consider to kill reclaim priority completely. Instead, we should consider to introduce per-zone pressure statistics.

Quoted 10 lines
Quoted 8 lines
---
 include/linux/mmzone.h |   15 ------------
 mm/page_alloc.c        |    2 -
 mm/vmscan.c            |   57 ------------------------------------------------
 mm/vmstat.c            |    2 -

The patch forgot to remove mem_cgroup_get_reclaim_priority() and friends.

Sure. thanks.
Will fix.

btw, current zone reclaim have wrong swap token usage.

	static int __zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order)
	{
	(snip)
	        disable_swap_token();
	        cond_resched();

I can't understand the reason why zone reclaim _always_ disable swap token. that's mean, if the system is enabled zone reclaim, swap token don't works at all.

Perhaps, original author's intention was following, I guess.

                priority = ZONE_RECLAIM_PRIORITY;
                do {
                        if ((zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_SWAP) && !priority)	// here
			        disable_swap_token();				// here

                        note_zone_scanning_priority(zone, priority);
                        shrink_zone(priority, zone, &sc);
                        priority--;
                } while (priority >= 0 && sc.nr_reclaimed < nr_pages);

However, if my understanding is correct, we can remove this disable_swap_token() completely. because zone reclaim failure don't bring to OOM-Killer, instead melery cause normal try_to_free_pages().

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#20 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 05/12] vmscan: kill prev_priority completely

Quoted 4 lines · KOSAKI Motohiro

sorry for the long delay.
(and I'm a bit wonder why I was not CCed this thread ;)

My fault, I unintentionally deleted your name from the send script. Sorry about that.

Quoted 36 lines
Quoted 36 lines
Quoted 8 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:46 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

From: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>

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.

This would have been badder in earlier days when we were using the scanning priority to decide when to start unmapping pte-mapped pages - page reclaim would have been recirculating large blobs of mapped pages around the LRU until the priority had built to the level where we started to unmap them.

However that priority-based decision got removed and right now I don't recall what it got replaced with. Aren't we now unmapping pages way too early and suffering an increased major&minor fault rate? Worried.

Things which are still broken after we broke prev_priority:

- If page reclaim is having a lot of trouble, prev_priority would have permitted do_try_to_free_pages() to call disable_swap_token() earlier on. As things presently stand, we'll do a lot of thrash-detection stuff before (presumably correctly) dropping the swap token.

So. What's up with that? I don't even remember _why_ we disable the swap token once the scanning priority gets severe and the code comments there are risible. And why do we wait until priority==0 rather than priority==1?

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 7 lines

- Busted prev_priority means that lumpy reclaim will act oddly. Every time someone goes into do some recalim, they'll start out not doing lumpy reclaim. Then, after a while, they'll get a clue and will start doing the lumpy thing. Then they return from reclaim and the next recalim caller will again forget that he should have done lumpy reclaim.

The intention of the code was to note that orders < PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER, there was an expectatation that those pages would be free or nearly free without page reclaim taking special steps with lumpy reclaim. If this has changed, it's almost certainly because of a greater dependence on high-order pages than previously which should be resisted (it has cropped up a few times recently). I do have a script that uses ftrace to count call sites using high-order allocations and how often they occur which would be of use if this problem is being investigated.

Quoted 33 lines
Quoted 11 lines

I dunno what the effects of this are in the real world, but it seems dumb.

And one has to wonder: if we're making these incorrect decisions based upon a bogus view of the current scanning difficulty, why are these various priority-based thresholding heuristics even in there? Are they doing anything useful?

So.. either we have a load of useless-crap-and-cruft in there which should be lopped out, or we don't have a load of useless-crap-and-cruft in there, and we should fix prev_priority.

May I explain my experience? I'd like to explain why prev_priority wouldn't works nowadays.

First of all, Yes, 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's 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.

Quoted 8 lines

In other word, prev_priority concept assume the sysmtem don't have lots threads.

And, I don't think lumpy reclaim threshold is big matter, because It was introduced to case aim7 corner case issue. I don't think such situation will occur frequently in the real workload. thus end users can't observe such logic.

I'm not aware of current problems with lumpy reclaim related stalls or problems but it's not something I have specifically investigated. If there is a known example workload that is felt to trigger lumpy reclaim more than it should, someone point me in the general direction and I'll take a look at it with ftrace and see what falls out.

Quoted 8 lines

For mapped-vs-unmapped thing, I dunnno the exactly reason. That was introduced by Rik, unfortunatelly I had not joined its activity at making design time. I can only say, while my testing the current code works good.

That said, my conclusion is opposite. For long term view, we should consider to kill reclaim priority completely. Instead, we should consider to introduce per-zone pressure statistics.

Ah, the "what is pressure?" rat-hole :)

Quoted 10 lines
Quoted 10 lines
Quoted 9 lines
---
 include/linux/mmzone.h |   15 ------------
 mm/page_alloc.c        |    2 -
 mm/vmscan.c            |   57 ------------------------------------------------
 mm/vmstat.c            |    2 -
Quoted 5 lines
Quoted 1 line

The patch forgot to remove mem_cgroup_get_reclaim_priority() and friends.

Sure. thanks.
Will fix.

I've fixed this up in the current patchset that is V3.

Quoted 31 lines

btw, current zone reclaim have wrong swap token usage.

	static int __zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order)
	{
	(snip)
	        disable_swap_token();
	        cond_resched();

I can't understand the reason why zone reclaim _always_ disable swap token. that's mean, if the system is enabled zone reclaim, swap token don't works at all.

Perhaps, original author's intention was following, I guess.

                priority = ZONE_RECLAIM_PRIORITY;
                do {
                        if ((zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_SWAP) && !priority)	// here
			        disable_swap_token();				// here

                        note_zone_scanning_priority(zone, priority);
                        shrink_zone(priority, zone, &sc);
                        priority--;
                } while (priority >= 0 && sc.nr_reclaimed < nr_pages);

However, if my understanding is correct, we can remove this disable_swap_token() completely. because zone reclaim failure don't bring to OOM-Killer, instead melery cause normal try_to_free_pages().

Signature · 3 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
author
#21 lore raw

PATCH 6/12 vmscan: simplify shrink_inactive_list()

In reply to Mel Gorman

From: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>

Now, max_scan of shrink_inactive_list() is always passed less than SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX. then, we can remove scanning pages loop in it. This patch also help stack diet.

detail
- remove "while (nr_scanned < max_scan)" loop
- remove nr_freed (now, we use nr_reclaimed directly)
- remove nr_scan (now, we use nr_scanned directly)
- rename max_scan to nr_to_scan
- pass nr_to_scan into isolate_pages() directly instead using SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX

---
 mm/vmscan.c |  211 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------------------
 1 files changed, 100 insertions(+), 111 deletions(-)
mm/vmscan.c +99 -110
index 29e1ecd..6a42ebc 100644
@@ -1132,15 +1132,21 @@ static int too_many_isolated(struct zone *zone, int file,
  * shrink_inactive_list() is a helper for shrink_zone().  It returns the number
  * of reclaimed pages
  */
-static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long max_scan,
+static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 			struct zone *zone, struct scan_control *sc,
 			int priority, int file)
 {
 	LIST_HEAD(page_list);
 	struct pagevec pvec;
-	unsigned long nr_scanned = 0;
+	unsigned long nr_scanned;
 	unsigned long nr_reclaimed = 0;
 	struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat = get_reclaim_stat(zone, sc);
+	struct page *page;
+	unsigned long nr_taken;
+	unsigned long nr_active;
+	unsigned int count[NR_LRU_LISTS] = { 0, };
+	unsigned long nr_anon;
+	unsigned long nr_file;
 
 	while (unlikely(too_many_isolated(zone, file, sc))) {
 		congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
@@ -1155,129 +1161,112 @@ static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long max_scan,
 
 	lru_add_drain();
 	spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-	do {
-		struct page *page;
-		unsigned long nr_taken;
-		unsigned long nr_scan;
-		unsigned long nr_freed;
-		unsigned long nr_active;
-		unsigned int count[NR_LRU_LISTS] = { 0, };
-		int mode = sc->lumpy_reclaim_mode ? ISOLATE_BOTH : ISOLATE_INACTIVE;
-		unsigned long nr_anon;
-		unsigned long nr_file;
 
-		if (scanning_global_lru(sc)) {
-			nr_taken = isolate_pages_global(SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX,
-							&page_list, &nr_scan,
-							sc->order, mode,
-							zone, 0, file);
-			zone->pages_scanned += nr_scan;
-			if (current_is_kswapd())
-				__count_zone_vm_events(PGSCAN_KSWAPD, zone,
-						       nr_scan);
-			else
-				__count_zone_vm_events(PGSCAN_DIRECT, zone,
-						       nr_scan);
-		} else {
-			nr_taken = mem_cgroup_isolate_pages(SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX,
-							&page_list, &nr_scan,
-							sc->order, mode,
-							zone, sc->mem_cgroup,
-							0, file);
-			/*
-			 * mem_cgroup_isolate_pages() keeps track of
-			 * scanned pages on its own.
-			 */
-		}
+	if (scanning_global_lru(sc)) {
+		nr_taken = isolate_pages_global(nr_to_scan,
+			&page_list, &nr_scanned, sc->order,
+			sc->lumpy_reclaim_mode ? ISOLATE_BOTH : ISOLATE_INACTIVE,
+			zone, 0, file);
+		zone->pages_scanned += nr_scanned;
+		if (current_is_kswapd())
+			__count_zone_vm_events(PGSCAN_KSWAPD, zone,
+					       nr_scanned);
+		else
+			__count_zone_vm_events(PGSCAN_DIRECT, zone,
+					       nr_scanned);
+	} else {
+		nr_taken = mem_cgroup_isolate_pages(nr_to_scan,
+			&page_list, &nr_scanned, sc->order,
+			sc->lumpy_reclaim_mode ? ISOLATE_BOTH : ISOLATE_INACTIVE,
+			zone, sc->mem_cgroup,
+			0, file);
+		/*
+		 * mem_cgroup_isolate_pages() keeps track of
+		 * scanned pages on its own.
+		 */
+	}
 
-		if (nr_taken == 0)
-			goto done;
+	if (nr_taken == 0)
+		goto done;
 
-		nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, count);
-		__count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
+	nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, count);
+	__count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
 
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_FILE,
-						-count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE]);
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_FILE,
-						-count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE]);
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_ANON,
-						-count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON]);
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_ANON,
-						-count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON]);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_FILE,
+					-count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE]);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_FILE,
+					-count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE]);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_ANON,
+					-count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON]);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_ANON,
+					-count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON]);
 
-		nr_anon = count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON];
-		nr_file = count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE];
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, nr_anon);
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, nr_file);
+	nr_anon = count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON];
+	nr_file = count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE];
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, nr_anon);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, nr_file);
 
-		reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[0] += nr_anon;
-		reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[1] += nr_file;
+	reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[0] += nr_anon;
+	reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[1] += nr_file;
 
-		spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+	spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
 
-		nr_scanned += nr_scan;
-		nr_freed = shrink_page_list(&page_list, sc, PAGEOUT_IO_ASYNC);
+	nr_reclaimed = shrink_page_list(&page_list, sc, PAGEOUT_IO_ASYNC);
+
+	/*
+	 * If we are direct reclaiming for contiguous pages and we do
+	 * not reclaim everything in the list, try again and wait
+	 * for IO to complete. This will stall high-order allocations
+	 * but that should be acceptable to the caller
+	 */
+	if (nr_reclaimed < nr_taken && !current_is_kswapd() && sc->lumpy_reclaim_mode) {
+		congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
 
 		/*
-		 * If we are direct reclaiming for contiguous pages and we do
-		 * not reclaim everything in the list, try again and wait
-		 * for IO to complete. This will stall high-order allocations
-		 * but that should be acceptable to the caller
+		 * The attempt at page out may have made some
+		 * of the pages active, mark them inactive again.
 		 */
-		if (nr_freed < nr_taken && !current_is_kswapd() &&
-		    sc->lumpy_reclaim_mode) {
-			congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
-
-			/*
-			 * The attempt at page out may have made some
-			 * of the pages active, mark them inactive again.
-			 */
-			nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, count);
-			count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
-
-			nr_freed += shrink_page_list(&page_list, sc,
-							PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC);
-		}
+		nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, count);
+		count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
 
-		nr_reclaimed += nr_freed;
+		nr_reclaimed += shrink_page_list(&page_list, sc, PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC);
+	}
 
-		local_irq_disable();
-		if (current_is_kswapd())
-			__count_vm_events(KSWAPD_STEAL, nr_freed);
-		__count_zone_vm_events(PGSTEAL, zone, nr_freed);
+	local_irq_disable();
+	if (current_is_kswapd())
+		__count_vm_events(KSWAPD_STEAL, nr_reclaimed);
+	__count_zone_vm_events(PGSTEAL, zone, nr_reclaimed);
 
-		spin_lock(&zone->lru_lock);
-		/*
-		 * Put back any unfreeable pages.
-		 */
-		while (!list_empty(&page_list)) {
-			int lru;
-			page = lru_to_page(&page_list);
-			VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page));
-			list_del(&page->lru);
-			if (unlikely(!page_evictable(page, NULL))) {
-				spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-				putback_lru_page(page);
-				spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-				continue;
-			}
-			SetPageLRU(page);
-			lru = page_lru(page);
-			add_page_to_lru_list(zone, page, lru);
-			if (is_active_lru(lru)) {
-				int file = is_file_lru(lru);
-				reclaim_stat->recent_rotated[file]++;
-			}
-			if (!pagevec_add(&pvec, page)) {
-				spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-				__pagevec_release(&pvec);
-				spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-			}
+	spin_lock(&zone->lru_lock);
+	/*
+	 * Put back any unfreeable pages.
+	 */
+	while (!list_empty(&page_list)) {
+		int lru;
+		page = lru_to_page(&page_list);
+		VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page));
+		list_del(&page->lru);
+		if (unlikely(!page_evictable(page, NULL))) {
+			spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+			putback_lru_page(page);
+			spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+			continue;
 		}
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, -nr_anon);
-		__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, -nr_file);
-
-  	} while (nr_scanned < max_scan);
+		SetPageLRU(page);
+		lru = page_lru(page);
+		add_page_to_lru_list(zone, page, lru);
+		if (is_active_lru(lru)) {
+			int file = is_file_lru(lru);
+			reclaim_stat->recent_rotated[file]++;
+		}
+		if (!pagevec_add(&pvec, page)) {
+			spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+			__pagevec_release(&pvec);
+			spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+		}
+	}
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, -nr_anon);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, -nr_file);
 
 done:
 	spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
Signature · 7 lines
1.7.1

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Reviewed-by on v1 6/12
#22 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 06/12] vmscan: simplify shrink_inactive_list()

Quoted 14 lines · Mel Gorman

From: KOSAKI Motohiro<[email protected]>

Now, max_scan of shrink_inactive_list() is always passed less than SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX. then, we can remove scanning pages loop in it. This patch also help stack diet.

detail
- remove "while (nr_scanned< max_scan)" loop
- remove nr_freed (now, we use nr_reclaimed directly)
- remove nr_scan (now, we use nr_scanned directly)
- rename max_scan to nr_to_scan
- pass nr_to_scan into isolate_pages() directly instead using SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX

Quoted 2 lines

Other than the weird whitespace below,

Quoted 8 lines
mm/vmscan.c +8 -0
+	/*
+	 * If we are direct reclaiming for contiguous pages and we do
+	 * not reclaim everything in the list, try again and wait
+	 * for IO to complete. This will stall high-order allocations
+	 * but that should be acceptable to the caller
+	 */
+	if (nr_reclaimed<  nr_taken&&  !current_is_kswapd()&&  sc->lumpy_reclaim_mode) {
+		congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
Signature · 7 lines
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author
#23 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 06/12] vmscan: simplify shrink_inactive_list()

Quoted 15 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 14 lines · Mel Gorman

From: KOSAKI Motohiro<[email protected]>

Now, max_scan of shrink_inactive_list() is always passed less than SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX. then, we can remove scanning pages loop in it. This patch also help stack diet.

detail
- remove "while (nr_scanned< max_scan)" loop
- remove nr_freed (now, we use nr_reclaimed directly)
- remove nr_scan (now, we use nr_scanned directly)
- rename max_scan to nr_to_scan
- pass nr_to_scan into isolate_pages() directly instead using SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX

Quoted 5 lines
Quoted 2 lines

Other than the weird whitespace below,

Not sure where this came out of. It's not in my local patch file nor in my working tree. Very odd.

Quoted 2 lines

Thanks

Quoted 12 lines
Quoted 8 lines
mm/vmscan.c +8 -0
+	/*
+	 * If we are direct reclaiming for contiguous pages and we do
+	 * not reclaim everything in the list, try again and wait
+	 * for IO to complete. This will stall high-order allocations
+	 * but that should be acceptable to the caller
+	 */
+	if (nr_reclaimed<  nr_taken&&  !current_is_kswapd()&&  sc->lumpy_reclaim_mode) {
+		congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
Signature · 1 line
All rights reversed
Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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author
#24 lore raw

PATCH 7/12 vmscan: Remove unnecessary temporary vars in do_try_to_free_pages

In reply to Mel Gorman

Remove temporary variable that is only used once and does not help clarify code.

---
 mm/vmscan.c |    8 +++-----
 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
mm/vmscan.c +3 -5
index 6a42ebc..246e084 100644
@@ -1721,13 +1721,12 @@ static void shrink_zone(int priority, struct zone *zone,
 static bool shrink_zones(int priority, struct zonelist *zonelist,
 					struct scan_control *sc)
 {
-	enum zone_type high_zoneidx = gfp_zone(sc->gfp_mask);
 	struct zoneref *z;
 	struct zone *zone;
 	bool all_unreclaimable = true;
 
-	for_each_zone_zonelist_nodemask(zone, z, zonelist, high_zoneidx,
-					sc->nodemask) {
+	for_each_zone_zonelist_nodemask(zone, z, zonelist,
+					gfp_zone(sc->gfp_mask), sc->nodemask) {
 		if (!populated_zone(zone))
 			continue;
 		/*
@@ -1773,7 +1772,6 @@ static unsigned long do_try_to_free_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist,
 	unsigned long lru_pages = 0;
 	struct zoneref *z;
 	struct zone *zone;
-	enum zone_type high_zoneidx = gfp_zone(sc->gfp_mask);
 	unsigned long writeback_threshold;
 
 	get_mems_allowed();
@@ -1785,7 +1783,7 @@ static unsigned long do_try_to_free_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist,
 	 * mem_cgroup will not do shrink_slab.
 	 */
 	if (scanning_global_lru(sc)) {
-		for_each_zone_zonelist(zone, z, zonelist, high_zoneidx) {
+		for_each_zone_zonelist(zone, z, zonelist, gfp_zone(sc->gfp_mask)) {
 
 			if (!cpuset_zone_allowed_hardwall(zone, GFP_KERNEL))
 				continue;
Signature · 1 line
1.7.1
Reviewed-by on v1 7/12
#25 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 07/12] vmscan: Remove unnecessary temporary vars in do_try_to_free_pages

Quoted 4 lines · Mel Gorman

Remove temporary variable that is only used once and does not help clarify code.

Signature · 7 lines
All rights reversed

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author
#26 lore raw

PATCH 8/12 vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_inactive_list()

In reply to Mel Gorman

shrink_inactive_list() sets up a pagevec to release unfreeable pages. It uses significant amounts of stack doing this. This patch splits shrink_inactive_list() to take the stack usage out of the main path so that callers to writepage() do not contain an unused pagevec on the stack.

---
 mm/vmscan.c |   95 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------------
 1 files changed, 54 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)
mm/vmscan.c +54 -41
index 246e084..34c5c87 100644
@@ -1129,19 +1129,65 @@ static int too_many_isolated(struct zone *zone, int file,
 }
 
 /*
+ * TODO: Try merging with migrations version of putback_lru_pages
+ */
+static noinline_for_stack void putback_lru_pages(struct zone *zone,
+				struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat,
+				unsigned long nr_anon, unsigned long nr_file,
+ 				struct list_head *page_list)
+{
+	struct page *page;
+	struct pagevec pvec;
+
+	pagevec_init(&pvec, 1);
+
+	/*
+	 * Put back any unfreeable pages.
+	 */
+	spin_lock(&zone->lru_lock);
+	while (!list_empty(page_list)) {
+		int lru;
+		page = lru_to_page(page_list);
+		VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page));
+		list_del(&page->lru);
+		if (unlikely(!page_evictable(page, NULL))) {
+			spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+			putback_lru_page(page);
+			spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+			continue;
+		}
+		SetPageLRU(page);
+		lru = page_lru(page);
+		add_page_to_lru_list(zone, page, lru);
+		if (is_active_lru(lru)) {
+			int file = is_file_lru(lru);
+			reclaim_stat->recent_rotated[file]++;
+		}
+		if (!pagevec_add(&pvec, page)) {
+			spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+			__pagevec_release(&pvec);
+			spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+		}
+	}
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, -nr_anon);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, -nr_file);
+
+	spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+	pagevec_release(&pvec);
+}
+
+/*
  * shrink_inactive_list() is a helper for shrink_zone().  It returns the number
  * of reclaimed pages
  */
-static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
+static noinline_for_stack unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 			struct zone *zone, struct scan_control *sc,
 			int priority, int file)
 {
 	LIST_HEAD(page_list);
-	struct pagevec pvec;
 	unsigned long nr_scanned;
 	unsigned long nr_reclaimed = 0;
 	struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat = get_reclaim_stat(zone, sc);
-	struct page *page;
 	unsigned long nr_taken;
 	unsigned long nr_active;
 	unsigned int count[NR_LRU_LISTS] = { 0, };
@@ -1157,8 +1203,6 @@ static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 	}
 
 
-	pagevec_init(&pvec, 1);
-
 	lru_add_drain();
 	spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
 
@@ -1186,8 +1230,10 @@ static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 		 */
 	}
 
-	if (nr_taken == 0)
-		goto done;
+	if (nr_taken == 0) {
+		spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
+		return 0;
+	}
 
 	nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, count);
 	__count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
@@ -1237,40 +1283,7 @@ static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 		__count_vm_events(KSWAPD_STEAL, nr_reclaimed);
 	__count_zone_vm_events(PGSTEAL, zone, nr_reclaimed);
 
-	spin_lock(&zone->lru_lock);
-	/*
-	 * Put back any unfreeable pages.
-	 */
-	while (!list_empty(&page_list)) {
-		int lru;
-		page = lru_to_page(&page_list);
-		VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page));
-		list_del(&page->lru);
-		if (unlikely(!page_evictable(page, NULL))) {
-			spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-			putback_lru_page(page);
-			spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-			continue;
-		}
-		SetPageLRU(page);
-		lru = page_lru(page);
-		add_page_to_lru_list(zone, page, lru);
-		if (is_active_lru(lru)) {
-			int file = is_file_lru(lru);
-			reclaim_stat->recent_rotated[file]++;
-		}
-		if (!pagevec_add(&pvec, page)) {
-			spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-			__pagevec_release(&pvec);
-			spin_lock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-		}
-	}
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, -nr_anon);
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, -nr_file);
-
-done:
-	spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
-	pagevec_release(&pvec);
+	putback_lru_pages(zone, reclaim_stat, nr_anon, nr_file, &page_list);
 	return nr_reclaimed;
 }
 
Signature · 1 line
1.7.1
Acked-by on v1 8/12
#27 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 08/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_inactive_list()

Quoted 8 lines · Mel Gorman

shrink_inactive_list() sets up a pagevec to release unfreeable pages. It uses significant amounts of stack doing this. This patch splits shrink_inactive_list() to take the stack usage out of the main path so that callers to writepage() do not contain an unused pagevec on the stack.

Signature · 7 lines
All rights reversed

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#28 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 08/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_inactive_list()

In reply to Mel Gorman

mm/vmscan.c static int too_many_isolated(struct zone *zone, int file, · line 1138

Quoted 8 lines · Mel Gorman

/*
+ * TODO: Try merging with migrations version of putback_lru_pages
+ */

mm/vmscan.c +5 -0
+static noinline_for_stack void putback_lru_pages(struct zone *zone,
+				struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat,
+				unsigned long nr_anon, unsigned long nr_file,
+ 				struct list_head *page_list)
+{

I hate to nitpick on this, but with noinline_for_stack a prototype really is unreadbale unless the function identifier goes to the next line. Compare the one above with:

static noinline_for_stack void
putback_lru_pages(struct zone *zone, struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat,
unsigned long nr_anon, unsigned long nr_file, struct list_head *page_list)

mm/vmscan.c static int too_many_isolated(struct zone *zone, int file, · line 1185

Quoted 4 lines
mm/vmscan.c +1 -1
-static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
+static noinline_for_stack unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 			struct zone *zone, struct scan_control *sc,
 			int priority, int file)

Same here, just even worse due to the spill over ove 80 characters.

author
#29 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 08/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_inactive_list()

Quoted 19 lines · Christoph Hellwig

mm/vmscan.c static int too_many_isolated(struct zone *zone, int file, · line 1138

Quoted 8 lines · Mel Gorman

/*
+ * TODO: Try merging with migrations version of putback_lru_pages
+ */

mm/vmscan.c +5 -0
+static noinline_for_stack void putback_lru_pages(struct zone *zone,
+				struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat,
+				unsigned long nr_anon, unsigned long nr_file,
+ 				struct list_head *page_list)
+{

I hate to nitpick on this, but with noinline_for_stack a prototype really is unreadbale unless the function identifier goes to the next line. Compare the one above with:

static noinline_for_stack void
putback_lru_pages(struct zone *zone, struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat,
unsigned long nr_anon, unsigned long nr_file, struct list_head *page_list)

Quoted 7 lines

mm/vmscan.c static int too_many_isolated(struct zone *zone, int file, · line 1185

Quoted 4 lines
mm/vmscan.c +1 -1
-static unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
+static noinline_for_stack unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to_scan,
 			struct zone *zone, struct scan_control *sc,
 			int priority, int file)

Same here, just even worse due to the spill over ove 80 characters.

It's a fair nitpick and so is cleaned up.

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#30 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 08/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_inactive_list()

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 5 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:49 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

shrink_inactive_list() sets up a pagevec to release unfreeable pages. It uses significant amounts of stack doing this. This patch splits shrink_inactive_list() to take the stack usage out of the main path so that callers to writepage() do not contain an unused pagevec on the stack.

You can get the entire pagevec off the stack - just make it a static-to-shrink_inactive_list() pagevec-per-cpu.

Locking just requires pinning to a CPU. We could trivially co-opt shrink_inactive_list()'s spin_lock_irq() for that, but pagevec_release() can be relatively expensive so it'd be sad to move that inside spin_lock_irq(). It'd be better to slap a get_cpu()/put_cpu() around the whole thing.

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author
#31 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 08/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_inactive_list()

Quoted 12 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 5 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:49 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

shrink_inactive_list() sets up a pagevec to release unfreeable pages. It uses significant amounts of stack doing this. This patch splits shrink_inactive_list() to take the stack usage out of the main path so that callers to writepage() do not contain an unused pagevec on the stack.

You can get the entire pagevec off the stack - just make it a static-to-shrink_inactive_list() pagevec-per-cpu.

That idea has been floated as well. I didn't pursue it because Dave said that giving page reclaim a stack diet was never going to be the full solution so I didn't think the complexity was justified.

I kept some of the stack reduction stuff because a) it was there and b) it would give kswapd extra headroom when calling writepage.

Quoted 6 lines

Locking just requires pinning to a CPU. We could trivially co-opt shrink_inactive_list()'s spin_lock_irq() for that, but pagevec_release() can be relatively expensive so it'd be sad to move that inside spin_lock_irq(). It'd be better to slap a get_cpu()/put_cpu() around the whole thing.

It'd be something interesting to try out when nothing else was happening but I'm not going to focus on it for the moment unless I think it will really help this stack overflow problem.

Signature · 3 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab
author
#32 lore raw

PATCH 9/12 vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_page_list()

In reply to Mel Gorman

shrink_page_list() sets up a pagevec to release pages as according as they are free. It uses significant amounts of stack on the pagevec. This patch adds pages to be freed via pagevec to a linked list which is then freed en-masse at the end. This avoids using stack in the main path that potentially calls writepage().

---
 mm/vmscan.c |   37 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
 1 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
mm/vmscan.c +29 -8
index 34c5c87..165c2f5 100644
@@ -620,6 +620,25 @@ static enum page_references page_check_references(struct page *page,
 	return PAGEREF_RECLAIM;
 }
 
+static noinline_for_stack void free_page_list(struct list_head *free_pages)
+{
+	struct pagevec freed_pvec;
+	struct page *page, *tmp;
+
+	pagevec_init(&freed_pvec, 1);
+
+	list_for_each_entry_safe(page, tmp, free_pages, lru) {
+		list_del(&page->lru);
+		if (!pagevec_add(&freed_pvec, page)) {
+			__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);
+			pagevec_reinit(&freed_pvec);
+		}
+	}
+
+	if (pagevec_count(&freed_pvec))
+		__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);
+}
+
 /*
  * shrink_page_list() returns the number of reclaimed pages
  */
@@ -628,13 +647,12 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 					enum pageout_io sync_writeback)
 {
 	LIST_HEAD(ret_pages);
-	struct pagevec freed_pvec;
+	LIST_HEAD(free_pages);
 	int pgactivate = 0;
 	unsigned long nr_reclaimed = 0;
 
 	cond_resched();
 
-	pagevec_init(&freed_pvec, 1);
 	while (!list_empty(page_list)) {
 		enum page_references references;
 		struct address_space *mapping;
@@ -809,10 +827,12 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 		__clear_page_locked(page);
 free_it:
 		nr_reclaimed++;
-		if (!pagevec_add(&freed_pvec, page)) {
-			__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);
-			pagevec_reinit(&freed_pvec);
-		}
+
+		/*
+		 * Is there need to periodically free_page_list? It would
+		 * appear not as the counts should be low
+		 */
+		list_add(&page->lru, &free_pages);
 		continue;
 
 cull_mlocked:
@@ -835,9 +855,10 @@ keep:
 		list_add(&page->lru, &ret_pages);
 		VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page) || PageUnevictable(page));
 	}
+
+	free_page_list(&free_pages);
+
 	list_splice(&ret_pages, page_list);
-	if (pagevec_count(&freed_pvec))
-		__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);
 	count_vm_events(PGACTIVATE, pgactivate);
 	return nr_reclaimed;
 }
Signature · 1 line
1.7.1
Reviewed-by on v1 9/12
#33 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 09/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_page_list()

Quoted 7 lines · Mel Gorman

shrink_page_list() sets up a pagevec to release pages as according as they are free. It uses significant amounts of stack on the pagevec. This patch adds pages to be freed via pagevec to a linked list which is then freed en-masse at the end. This avoids using stack in the main path that potentially calls writepage().

Signature · 7 lines
All rights reversed

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maintainer
#34 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 09/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_page_list()

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 6 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:50 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

shrink_page_list() sets up a pagevec to release pages as according as they are free. It uses significant amounts of stack on the pagevec. This patch adds pages to be freed via pagevec to a linked list which is then freed en-masse at the end. This avoids using stack in the main path that potentially calls writepage().

hm, spose so. I cen't see any trivial way to eliminate the local pagevec there.

mm/vmscan.c static enum page_references page_check_references(struct page *page,

Quoted 5 lines
mm/vmscan.c +2 -2
+	if (pagevec_count(&freed_pvec))
+		__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);
...
-	if (pagevec_count(&freed_pvec))
-		__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);

That's an open-coded pagevec_free().

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author
#35 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 09/12] vmscan: Setup pagevec as late as possible in shrink_page_list()

Quoted 13 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 6 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:50 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

shrink_page_list() sets up a pagevec to release pages as according as they are free. It uses significant amounts of stack on the pagevec. This patch adds pages to be freed via pagevec to a linked list which is then freed en-masse at the end. This avoids using stack in the main path that potentially calls writepage().

hm, spose so. I cen't see any trivial way to eliminate the local pagevec there.

Quoted 8 lines

mm/vmscan.c static enum page_references page_check_references(struct page *page,

Quoted 5 lines
mm/vmscan.c +2 -2
+	if (pagevec_count(&freed_pvec))
+		__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);
...
-	if (pagevec_count(&freed_pvec))
-		__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);

That's an open-coded pagevec_free().

Fair point, will correct. Thanks

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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author
#36 lore raw

PATCH 10/12 vmscan: Update isolated page counters outside of main path in shrink_inactive_list()

In reply to Mel Gorman

When shrink_inactive_list() isolates pages, it updates a number of counters using temporary variables to gather them. These consume stack and it's in the main path that calls ->writepage(). This patch moves the accounting updates outside of the main path to reduce stack usage.

---
 mm/vmscan.c |   63 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------------------
 1 files changed, 38 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)
mm/vmscan.c +38 -25
index 165c2f5..019f0af 100644
@@ -1073,7 +1073,8 @@ static unsigned long clear_active_flags(struct list_head *page_list,
 			ClearPageActive(page);
 			nr_active++;
 		}
-		count[lru]++;
+		if (count)
+			count[lru]++;
 	}
 
 	return nr_active;
@@ -1153,12 +1154,13 @@ static int too_many_isolated(struct zone *zone, int file,
  * TODO: Try merging with migrations version of putback_lru_pages
  */
 static noinline_for_stack void putback_lru_pages(struct zone *zone,
-				struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat,
+				struct scan_control *sc,
 				unsigned long nr_anon, unsigned long nr_file,
  				struct list_head *page_list)
 {
 	struct page *page;
 	struct pagevec pvec;
+	struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat = get_reclaim_stat(zone, sc);
 
 	pagevec_init(&pvec, 1);
 
@@ -1197,6 +1199,37 @@ static noinline_for_stack void putback_lru_pages(struct zone *zone,
 	pagevec_release(&pvec);
 }
 
+static noinline_for_stack void update_isolated_counts(struct zone *zone, 
+					struct scan_control *sc,
+					unsigned long *nr_anon,
+					unsigned long *nr_file,
+					struct list_head *isolated_list)
+{
+	unsigned long nr_active;
+	unsigned int count[NR_LRU_LISTS] = { 0, };
+	struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat = get_reclaim_stat(zone, sc);
+
+	nr_active = clear_active_flags(isolated_list, count);
+	__count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
+
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_FILE,
+			      -count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE]);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_FILE,
+			      -count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE]);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_ANON,
+			      -count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON]);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_ANON,
+			      -count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON]);
+
+	*nr_anon = count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON];
+	*nr_file = count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE];
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, *nr_anon);
+	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, *nr_file);
+
+	reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[0] += *nr_anon;
+	reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[1] += *nr_file;
+}
+
 /*
  * shrink_inactive_list() is a helper for shrink_zone().  It returns the number
  * of reclaimed pages
@@ -1208,10 +1241,8 @@ static noinline_for_stack unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to
 	LIST_HEAD(page_list);
 	unsigned long nr_scanned;
 	unsigned long nr_reclaimed = 0;
-	struct zone_reclaim_stat *reclaim_stat = get_reclaim_stat(zone, sc);
 	unsigned long nr_taken;
 	unsigned long nr_active;
-	unsigned int count[NR_LRU_LISTS] = { 0, };
 	unsigned long nr_anon;
 	unsigned long nr_file;
 
@@ -1256,25 +1287,7 @@ static noinline_for_stack unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to
 		return 0;
 	}
 
-	nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, count);
-	__count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
-
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_FILE,
-					-count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE]);
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_FILE,
-					-count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE]);
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ACTIVE_ANON,
-					-count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON]);
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_INACTIVE_ANON,
-					-count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON]);
-
-	nr_anon = count[LRU_ACTIVE_ANON] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_ANON];
-	nr_file = count[LRU_ACTIVE_FILE] + count[LRU_INACTIVE_FILE];
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_ANON, nr_anon);
-	__mod_zone_page_state(zone, NR_ISOLATED_FILE, nr_file);
-
-	reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[0] += nr_anon;
-	reclaim_stat->recent_scanned[1] += nr_file;
+	update_isolated_counts(zone, sc, &nr_anon, &nr_file, &page_list);
 
 	spin_unlock_irq(&zone->lru_lock);
 
@@ -1293,7 +1306,7 @@ static noinline_for_stack unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to
 		 * The attempt at page out may have made some
 		 * of the pages active, mark them inactive again.
 		 */
-		nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, count);
+		nr_active = clear_active_flags(&page_list, NULL);
 		count_vm_events(PGDEACTIVATE, nr_active);
 
 		nr_reclaimed += shrink_page_list(&page_list, sc, PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC);
@@ -1304,7 +1317,7 @@ static noinline_for_stack unsigned long shrink_inactive_list(unsigned long nr_to
 		__count_vm_events(KSWAPD_STEAL, nr_reclaimed);
 	__count_zone_vm_events(PGSTEAL, zone, nr_reclaimed);
 
-	putback_lru_pages(zone, reclaim_stat, nr_anon, nr_file, &page_list);
+	putback_lru_pages(zone, sc, nr_anon, nr_file, &page_list);
 	return nr_reclaimed;
 }
 
Signature · 1 line
1.7.1
Acked-by on v1 10/12
#37 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 10/12] vmscan: Update isolated page counters outside of main path in shrink_inactive_list()

Quoted 7 lines · Mel Gorman

When shrink_inactive_list() isolates pages, it updates a number of counters using temporary variables to gather them. These consume stack and it's in the main path that calls ->writepage(). This patch moves the accounting updates outside of the main path to reduce stack usage.

Signature · 7 lines
All rights reversed

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author
#38 lore raw

PATCH 11/12 vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Mel Gorman

Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise.

This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward.

---
 mm/vmscan.c |  175 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
 1 files changed, 131 insertions(+), 44 deletions(-)
mm/vmscan.c +131 -44
index 019f0af..4856a2a 100644
@@ -323,6 +323,55 @@ typedef enum {
 	PAGE_CLEAN,
 } pageout_t;
 
+int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
+						enum pageout_io sync_writeback)
+{
+	int res;
+	struct writeback_control wbc = {
+		.sync_mode = WB_SYNC_NONE,
+		.nr_to_write = SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX,
+		.range_start = 0,
+		.range_end = LLONG_MAX,
+		.nonblocking = 1,
+		.for_reclaim = 1,
+	};
+
+	if (!clear_page_dirty_for_io(page))
+		return PAGE_CLEAN;
+
+	SetPageReclaim(page);
+	res = mapping->a_ops->writepage(page, &wbc);
+	/*
+	 * XXX: This is the Holy Hand Grenade of PotentiallyInvalidMapping. As
+	 * the page lock has been dropped by ->writepage, that mapping could
+	 * be anything
+	 */
+	if (res < 0)
+		handle_write_error(mapping, page, res);
+	if (res == AOP_WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE) {
+		ClearPageReclaim(page);
+		return PAGE_ACTIVATE;
+	}
+
+	/*
+	 * Wait on writeback if requested to. This happens when
+	 * direct reclaiming a large contiguous area and the
+	 * first attempt to free a range of pages fails.
+	 */
+	if (PageWriteback(page) && sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC)
+		wait_on_page_writeback(page);
+
+	if (!PageWriteback(page)) {
+		/* synchronous write or broken a_ops? */
+		ClearPageReclaim(page);
+	}
+	trace_mm_vmscan_writepage(page,
+		sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC);
+	inc_zone_page_state(page, NR_VMSCAN_WRITE);
+
+	return PAGE_SUCCESS;
+}
+
 /*
  * pageout is called by shrink_page_list() for each dirty page.
  * Calls ->writepage().
@@ -367,45 +416,7 @@ static pageout_t pageout(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
 	if (!may_write_to_queue(mapping->backing_dev_info))
 		return PAGE_KEEP;
 
-	if (clear_page_dirty_for_io(page)) {
-		int res;
-		struct writeback_control wbc = {
-			.sync_mode = WB_SYNC_NONE,
-			.nr_to_write = SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX,
-			.range_start = 0,
-			.range_end = LLONG_MAX,
-			.nonblocking = 1,
-			.for_reclaim = 1,
-		};
-
-		SetPageReclaim(page);
-		res = mapping->a_ops->writepage(page, &wbc);
-		if (res < 0)
-			handle_write_error(mapping, page, res);
-		if (res == AOP_WRITEPAGE_ACTIVATE) {
-			ClearPageReclaim(page);
-			return PAGE_ACTIVATE;
-		}
-
-		/*
-		 * Wait on writeback if requested to. This happens when
-		 * direct reclaiming a large contiguous area and the
-		 * first attempt to free a range of pages fails.
-		 */
-		if (PageWriteback(page) && sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC)
-			wait_on_page_writeback(page);
-
-		if (!PageWriteback(page)) {
-			/* synchronous write or broken a_ops? */
-			ClearPageReclaim(page);
-		}
-		trace_mm_vmscan_writepage(page,
-			sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC);
-		inc_zone_page_state(page, NR_VMSCAN_WRITE);
-		return PAGE_SUCCESS;
-	}
-
-	return PAGE_CLEAN;
+	return write_reclaim_page(page, mapping, sync_writeback);
 }
 
 /*
@@ -640,19 +651,75 @@ static noinline_for_stack void free_page_list(struct list_head *free_pages)
 }
 
 /*
+ * Clean a list of pages. It is expected that all the pages on page_list have been
+ * locked as part of isolation from the LRU.
+ *
+ * XXX: Is there a problem with holding multiple page locks like this?
+ */
+static noinline_for_stack void clean_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
+				struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	LIST_HEAD(ret_pages);
+	struct page *page;
+
+	if (!sc->may_writepage)
+		return;
+
+	/* Write the pages out to disk in ranges where possible */
+	while (!list_empty(page_list)) {
+		struct address_space *mapping;
+		bool may_enter_fs;
+
+		page = lru_to_page(page_list);
+		list_del(&page->lru);
+		list_add(&page->lru, &ret_pages);
+
+		mapping = page_mapping(page);
+		if (!mapping || !may_write_to_queue(mapping->backing_dev_info)) {
+			unlock_page(page);
+			continue;
+		}
+
+		may_enter_fs = (sc->gfp_mask & __GFP_FS) ||
+			(PageSwapCache(page) && (sc->gfp_mask & __GFP_IO));
+		if (!may_enter_fs) {
+			unlock_page(page);
+			continue;
+		}
+
+		/* Write single page */
+		switch (write_reclaim_page(page, mapping, PAGEOUT_IO_ASYNC)) {
+		case PAGE_KEEP:
+		case PAGE_ACTIVATE:
+		case PAGE_CLEAN:
+			unlock_page(page);
+			break;
+		case PAGE_SUCCESS:
+			break;
+		}
+	}
+	list_splice(&ret_pages, page_list);
+}
+
+/*
  * shrink_page_list() returns the number of reclaimed pages
  */
 static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 					struct scan_control *sc,
 					enum pageout_io sync_writeback)
 {
-	LIST_HEAD(ret_pages);
 	LIST_HEAD(free_pages);
-	int pgactivate = 0;
+	LIST_HEAD(putback_pages);
+	LIST_HEAD(dirty_pages);
+	struct list_head *ret_list = page_list;
+	int pgactivate;
+	bool cleaned = false;
 	unsigned long nr_reclaimed = 0;
 
+	pgactivate = 0;
 	cond_resched();
 
+restart_dirty:
 	while (!list_empty(page_list)) {
 		enum page_references references;
 		struct address_space *mapping;
@@ -741,7 +808,18 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 			}
 		}
 
-		if (PageDirty(page)) {
+		if (PageDirty(page))  {
+			/*
+			 * On the first pass, dirty pages are put on a separate
+			 * list. IO is then queued based on ranges of pages for
+			 * each unique mapping in the list
+			 */
+			if (!cleaned) {
+				/* Keep locked for clean_page_list */
+				list_add(&page->lru, &dirty_pages);
+				goto keep_dirty;
+			}
+
 			if (references == PAGEREF_RECLAIM_CLEAN)
 				goto keep_locked;
 			if (!may_enter_fs)
@@ -852,13 +930,22 @@ activate_locked:
 keep_locked:
 		unlock_page(page);
 keep:
-		list_add(&page->lru, &ret_pages);
+		list_add(&page->lru, &putback_pages);
+keep_dirty:
 		VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page) || PageUnevictable(page));
 	}
 
+	if (!cleaned && !list_empty(&dirty_pages)) {
+		clean_page_list(&dirty_pages, sc);
+		page_list = &dirty_pages;
+		cleaned = true;
+		goto restart_dirty;
+	}
+	BUG_ON(!list_empty(&dirty_pages));
+
 	free_page_list(&free_pages);
 
-	list_splice(&ret_pages, page_list);
+	list_splice(&putback_pages, ret_list);
 	count_vm_events(PGACTIVATE, pgactivate);
 	return nr_reclaimed;
 }
Signature · 1 line
1.7.1
Reviewed-by on v1 11/12
#39 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 7 lines · Mel Gorman

Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise.

Reclaiming clean pages should be fast enough that this should make little, if any, difference.

Quoted 3 lines

This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward.

However, this is a convincing argument :)

Quoted 1 line
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#40 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 9 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 7 lines · Mel Gorman

Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise.

Quoted 3 lines

Reclaiming clean pages should be fast enough that this should make little, if any, difference.

Indeed, this was a bit weak. The original point of the patch was to write contiguous pages belonging to the same inode when they were encountered in that batch which made a bit more sense but didn't work out at first pass.

Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 3 lines

This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward.

However, this is a convincing argument :)

Thanks.

Quoted 4 lines
Quoted 1 line

Thanks again :)

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#41 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 11 lines · Mel Gorman

Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise.

This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward.

Seeing as you have a list of pages for IO, perhaps they could be sorted before issuing ->writepage on them.

That is, while this patch issues all the IO in one hit, it doesn't change the order in which the IO is issued - it is still issued in LRU order. Given that they are issued in a short period of time now, rather than across a longer scan period, it is likely that it will not be any faster as:

a) IO will not be started as soon, and
b) the IO scheduler still only has a small re-ordering window and will choke just as much on random IO patterns.

However, there is a list_sort() function that could be used to sort the list; sorting the list of pages by mapping and page->index within the mapping would result in all the pages on each mapping being sent down in ascending offset order at once - exactly how the filesystems want IO to be sent to it. Perhaps this is a simple improvement that can be made to this code that will make a big difference to worst case performance.

FWIW, I did this for delayed metadata buffer writeback in XFS recently (i.e. sort the queue of (potentially tens of thousands of) buffers in ascending block order before dispatch) and that showed a 10-15% reduction in seeks on simple kernel compile workloads. This shows that if we optimise IO patterns at higher layers where the sort window is much, much larger than in the IO scheduler, then overall system performance improves....

Cheers,

Dave.

Signature · 8 lines
Dave Chinner
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#42 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 34 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:11:44 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 11 lines · Mel Gorman

Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise.

This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward.

Seeing as you have a list of pages for IO, perhaps they could be sorted before issuing ->writepage on them.

That is, while this patch issues all the IO in one hit, it doesn't change the order in which the IO is issued - it is still issued in LRU order. Given that they are issued in a short period of time now, rather than across a longer scan period, it is likely that it will not be any faster as:

a) IO will not be started as soon, and
b) the IO scheduler still only has a small re-ordering window and will choke just as much on random IO patterns.

However, there is a list_sort() function that could be used to sort the list; sorting the list of pages by mapping and page->index within the mapping would result in all the pages on each mapping being sent down in ascending offset order at once - exactly how the filesystems want IO to be sent to it. Perhaps this is a simple improvement that can be made to this code that will make a big difference to worst case performance.

Quoted 7 lines

FWIW, I did this for delayed metadata buffer writeback in XFS recently (i.e. sort the queue of (potentially tens of thousands of) buffers in ascending block order before dispatch) and that showed a 10-15% reduction in seeks on simple kernel compile workloads. This shows that if we optimise IO patterns at higher layers where the sort window is much, much larger than in the IO scheduler, then overall system performance improves....

Yup.

But then, this all really should be done at the block layer so other io-submitting-paths can benefit from it.

IOW, maybe "the sort queue is the submission queue" wasn't a good idea.

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#43 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 45 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 34 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:11:44 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 11 lines · Mel Gorman

Page reclaim cleans individual pages using a_ops->writepage() because from the VM perspective, it is known that pages in a particular zone must be freed soon, it considers the target page to be the oldest and it does not want to wait while background flushers cleans other pages. From a filesystem perspective this is extremely inefficient as it generates a very seeky IO pattern leading to the perverse situation where it can take longer to clean all dirty pages than it would have otherwise.

This patch queues all dirty pages at once to maximise the chances that the write requests get merged efficiently. It also makes the next patch that avoids writeout from direct reclaim more straight-forward.

Seeing as you have a list of pages for IO, perhaps they could be sorted before issuing ->writepage on them.

That is, while this patch issues all the IO in one hit, it doesn't change the order in which the IO is issued - it is still issued in LRU order. Given that they are issued in a short period of time now, rather than across a longer scan period, it is likely that it will not be any faster as:

a) IO will not be started as soon, and
b) the IO scheduler still only has a small re-ordering window and will choke just as much on random IO patterns.

However, there is a list_sort() function that could be used to sort the list; sorting the list of pages by mapping and page->index within the mapping would result in all the pages on each mapping being sent down in ascending offset order at once - exactly how the filesystems want IO to be sent to it. Perhaps this is a simple improvement that can be made to this code that will make a big difference to worst case performance.

Quoted 7 lines

FWIW, I did this for delayed metadata buffer writeback in XFS recently (i.e. sort the queue of (potentially tens of thousands of) buffers in ascending block order before dispatch) and that showed a 10-15% reduction in seeks on simple kernel compile workloads. This shows that if we optimise IO patterns at higher layers where the sort window is much, much larger than in the IO scheduler, then overall system performance improves....

Quoted 4 lines

Yup.

But then, this all really should be done at the block layer so other io-submitting-paths can benefit from it.

That was what we did in the past with really, really deep IO scheduler queues. That leads to IO latency and OOM problems because we could lock gigabytes of memory away under IO and take minutes to clean it.

Besides, there really isn't the right context in the block layer to be able to queue and prioritise large amounts of IO without significant penalties to some higher layer operation.

Quoted 1 line

IOW, maybe "the sort queue is the submission queue" wasn't a good idea.

Perhaps, but IMO sorting should be done where the context allows it to be done most efficiently. Sorting is most effective when ever a significant queue of IO is formed, whether it be in the filesystem, the VFS, the VM or the block layer because the IO stack is very much a GIGO queue.

Simply put, there's nothing the lower layers can do to optimise bad IO patterns from the higher layers because they have small sort windows which are necessary to keep IO latency in check. Hence if the higher layers feed the lower layers crap they simply don't have the context or depth to perform the same level of optimistations we can do easily higher up the stack.

IOWs, IMO anywhere there is a context with significant queue of IO, that's where we should be doing a better job of sorting before that IO is dispatched to the lower layers. This is still no guarantee of better IO (e.g. if the filesystem fragments the file) but it does give the lower layers a far better chance at optimal allocation and scheduling of IO...

Cheers,

Dave.

Signature · 8 lines
Dave Chinner
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#44 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 5 lines · Dave Chinner
Quoted 2 lines · Andrew Morton

But then, this all really should be done at the block layer so other io-submitting-paths can benefit from it.

Quoted 8 lines

That was what we did in the past with really, really deep IO scheduler queues. That leads to IO latency and OOM problems because we could lock gigabytes of memory away under IO and take minutes to clean it.

Besides, there really isn't the right context in the block layer to be able to queue and prioritise large amounts of IO without significant penalties to some higher layer operation.

Can we kick flushing for the whole inode at once from vmscan.c?

That way we should:
1) ensure that the page we want is written to disk, and
2) we flush out related pages at the same time, getting a decent IO pattern

Chances are that if we want to evict one page from a file, we'll also want to evict other pages from that same file. In fact, chances are a good number of them will live nearby on the LRU list.

Does this make sense?

Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" way to call the filesystem flushing threads?

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#45 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 2 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:16:29 -0400 Rik van Riel <[email protected]> wrote:

Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" way to call the filesystem flushing threads?

Passing the igrab()bed inode into the flusher threads would fix the iput_final() problems, as long as the alloc_pages() caller never blocks indefinitely waiting for the work which the flusher threads are doing.

Otherwise we get (very hard-to-hit) deadlocks where the alloc_pages() caller holds VFS locks and is waiting for the flusher threads while all the flusher threads are stuck under iput_final() waiting for those VFS locks.

That's fixable by not using igrab()/iput(). You can use lock_page() to pin the address_space. Pass the address of the locked page across to the flusher threads so they don't try to lock it a second time, or just use trylocking on that writeback path or whatever.

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#46 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 14 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 2 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:16:29 -0400 Rik van Riel<[email protected]> wrote:

Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" way to call the filesystem flushing threads?

Passing the igrab()bed inode into the flusher threads would fix the iput_final() problems, as long as the alloc_pages() caller never blocks indefinitely waiting for the work which the flusher threads are doing.

Otherwise we get (very hard-to-hit) deadlocks where the alloc_pages() caller holds VFS locks and is waiting for the flusher threads while all the flusher threads are stuck under iput_final() waiting for those VFS locks.

Quoted 4 lines

That's fixable by not using igrab()/iput(). You can use lock_page() to pin the address_space. Pass the address of the locked page across to the flusher threads so they don't try to lock it a second time, or just use trylocking on that writeback path or whatever.

Any thread that does not have __GFP_FS set in its gfp_mask cannot wait for the flusher to complete. This is regardless of the mechanism used to kick the flusher.

Then again, those threads cannot call ->writepage today either, so we should be fine keeping that behaviour.

Threads that do have __GFP_FS in their gfp_mask can wait for the flusher in various ways. Maybe the lock_page() method can be simplified by having the flusher thread unlock the page the moment it gets it, and then run the normal flusher code?

The pageout code (in shrink_page_list) already unlocks the page anyway before putting it back on the relevant LRU list. It would be easy enough to skip that unlock and let the flusher thread take care of it.

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#47 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 15 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:08:14 -0400 Rik van Riel <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 14 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 2 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:16:29 -0400 Rik van Riel<[email protected]> wrote:

Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" way to call the filesystem flushing threads?

Passing the igrab()bed inode into the flusher threads would fix the iput_final() problems, as long as the alloc_pages() caller never blocks indefinitely waiting for the work which the flusher threads are doing.

Otherwise we get (very hard-to-hit) deadlocks where the alloc_pages() caller holds VFS locks and is waiting for the flusher threads while all the flusher threads are stuck under iput_final() waiting for those VFS locks.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 4 lines

That's fixable by not using igrab()/iput(). You can use lock_page() to pin the address_space. Pass the address of the locked page across to the flusher threads so they don't try to lock it a second time, or just use trylocking on that writeback path or whatever.

Any thread that does not have __GFP_FS set in its gfp_mask cannot wait for the flusher to complete. This is regardless of the mechanism used to kick the flusher.

mm... kinda. A bare order-zero __GFP_WAIT allocation can still wait forever, afaict.

Quoted 2 lines

Then again, those threads cannot call ->writepage today either, so we should be fine keeping that behaviour.

I'm not sure. iput_final() can take a lot of locks, both VFS and heaven knows what within the individual filesystems. Is it the case that all allocations which occur under all of those locks is always !__GFP_FS? Hard to say...

Quoted 5 lines

Threads that do have __GFP_FS in their gfp_mask can wait for the flusher in various ways. Maybe the lock_page() method can be simplified by having the flusher thread unlock the page the moment it gets it, and then run the normal flusher code?

Well, _something_ has to pin the address_space. A single locked page will do.

Quoted 4 lines

The pageout code (in shrink_page_list) already unlocks the page anyway before putting it back on the relevant LRU list. It would be easy enough to skip that unlock and let the flusher thread take care of it.

Once that page is unlocked, we can't touch *mapping - its inode can be concurrently reclaimed. Although I guess the technique in handle_write_error() can be reused.

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#48 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 29 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 15 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:08:14 -0400 Rik van Riel <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 14 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 2 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:16:29 -0400 Rik van Riel<[email protected]> wrote:

Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" way to call the filesystem flushing threads?

Passing the igrab()bed inode into the flusher threads would fix the iput_final() problems, as long as the alloc_pages() caller never blocks indefinitely waiting for the work which the flusher threads are doing.

Otherwise we get (very hard-to-hit) deadlocks where the alloc_pages() caller holds VFS locks and is waiting for the flusher threads while all the flusher threads are stuck under iput_final() waiting for those VFS locks.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 4 lines

That's fixable by not using igrab()/iput(). You can use lock_page() to pin the address_space. Pass the address of the locked page across to the flusher threads so they don't try to lock it a second time, or just use trylocking on that writeback path or whatever.

Any thread that does not have __GFP_FS set in its gfp_mask cannot wait for the flusher to complete. This is regardless of the mechanism used to kick the flusher.

mm... kinda. A bare order-zero __GFP_WAIT allocation can still wait forever, afaict.

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 2 lines

Then again, those threads cannot call ->writepage today either, so we should be fine keeping that behaviour.

I'm not sure. iput_final() can take a lot of locks, both VFS and heaven knows what within the individual filesystems. Is it the case that all allocations which occur under all of those locks is always !__GFP_FS? Hard to say...

__GFP_FS is set with i_mutex held in places, and there is nothing to prevent a filesystem from using that in iput_final paths, AFAIK.

Quoted 9 lines
Quoted 5 lines

Threads that do have __GFP_FS in their gfp_mask can wait for the flusher in various ways. Maybe the lock_page() method can be simplified by having the flusher thread unlock the page the moment it gets it, and then run the normal flusher code?

Well, _something_ has to pin the address_space. A single locked page will do.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 4 lines

The pageout code (in shrink_page_list) already unlocks the page anyway before putting it back on the relevant LRU list. It would be easy enough to skip that unlock and let the flusher thread take care of it.

Once that page is unlocked, we can't touch *mapping - its inode can be concurrently reclaimed. Although I guess the technique in handle_write_error() can be reused.

Nasty. That guy needs to be using lock_page_nosync().

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#49 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 mm: vmscan fix mapping use after free

Quoted 5 lines · Nick Piggin
Quoted 3 lines

Once that page is unlocked, we can't touch *mapping - its inode can be concurrently reclaimed. Although I guess the technique in handle_write_error() can be reused.

Nasty. That guy needs to be using lock_page_nosync().

--

Need lock_page_nosync here because we have no reference to the mapping when taking the page lock.

---
 mm/vmscan.c |    2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
mm/vmscan.c +1 -1
Index: linux-2.6/mm/vmscan.c
===================================================================
@@ -296,7 +296,7 @@ static int may_write_to_queue(struct bac
 static void handle_write_error(struct address_space *mapping,
 				struct page *page, int error)
 {
-	lock_page(page);
+	lock_page_nosync(page);
 	if (page_mapping(page) == mapping)
 		mapping_set_error(mapping, error);
 	unlock_page(page);

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author
#50 lore raw

Re: [patch] mm: vmscan fix mapping use after free

Quoted 5 lines · Nick Piggin
Quoted 4 lines · Nick Piggin
Quoted 3 lines

Once that page is unlocked, we can't touch *mapping - its inode can be concurrently reclaimed. Although I guess the technique in handle_write_error() can be reused.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 1 line

Nasty. That guy needs to be using lock_page_nosync().

--

Need lock_page_nosync here because we have no reference to the mapping when taking the page lock.

Thanks, I've picked this up and merged it into the series and removed the "hand grenade" comment.

Quoted 18 lines
---
 mm/vmscan.c |    2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Index: linux-2.6/mm/vmscan.c
===================================================================

mm/vmscan.c +1 -1
@@ -296,7 +296,7 @@ static int may_write_to_queue(struct bac
 static void handle_write_error(struct address_space *mapping,
 				struct page *page, int error)
 {
-	lock_page(page);
+	lock_page_nosync(page);
 	if (page_mapping(page) == mapping)
 		mapping_set_error(mapping, error);
 	unlock_page(page);
Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#51 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Rik van Riel
Quoted 6 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 3 lines

Besides, there really isn't the right context in the block layer to be able to queue and prioritise large amounts of IO without significant penalties to some higher layer operation.

Can we kick flushing for the whole inode at once from vmscan.c?

kswapd really should be a last effort tool to clean filesystem pages. If it does enough I/O for this to matter significantly we need to fix the VM to move more work to the flusher threads instead of trying to fix kswapd.

Quoted 2 lines

Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" way to call the filesystem flushing threads?

We already have that API, in Jens' latest tree that's sync_inodes_sb/writeback_inodes_sb. We could also add a non-waiting variant if required, but I think the big problem with kswapd is that we want to wait on I/O completion under circumstances.

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#52 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 13 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 6 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 3 lines

Besides, there really isn't the right context in the block layer to be able to queue and prioritise large amounts of IO without significant penalties to some higher layer operation.

Can we kick flushing for the whole inode at once from vmscan.c?

kswapd really should be a last effort tool to clean filesystem pages. If it does enough I/O for this to matter significantly we need to fix the VM to move more work to the flusher threads instead of trying to fix kswapd.

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 2 lines

Would it be hard to add a "please flush this file" way to call the filesystem flushing threads?

We already have that API, in Jens' latest tree that's sync_inodes_sb/writeback_inodes_sb. We could also add a non-waiting variant if required, but I think the big problem with kswapd is that we want to wait on I/O completion under circumstances.

However, kswapd does not need to wait on I/O completion of any page in particular - it just wants to wait on I/O completion of any inactive pages in the zone (or memcg) where memory is being freed.

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#53 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Dave Chinner
Quoted 36 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:39:43 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 10 lines · Andrew Morton

On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:11:44 +1000

Quoted 4 lines

10-15% reduction in seeks on simple kernel compile workloads. This shows that if we optimise IO patterns at higher layers where the sort window is much, much larger than in the IO scheduler, then overall system performance improves....

Yup.

But then, this all really should be done at the block layer so other io-submitting-paths can benefit from it.

That was what we did in the past with really, really deep IO scheduler queues. That leads to IO latency and OOM problems because we could lock gigabytes of memory away under IO and take minutes to clean it.

Besides, there really isn't the right context in the block layer to be able to queue and prioritise large amounts of IO without significant penalties to some higher layer operation.

Quoted 1 line

IOW, maybe "the sort queue is the submission queue" wasn't a good idea.

Perhaps, but IMO sorting should be done where the context allows it to be done most efficiently. Sorting is most effective when ever a significant queue of IO is formed, whether it be in the filesystem, the VFS, the VM or the block layer because the IO stack is very much a GIGO queue.

Simply put, there's nothing the lower layers can do to optimise bad IO patterns from the higher layers because they have small sort windows which are necessary to keep IO latency in check. Hence if the higher layers feed the lower layers crap they simply don't have the context or depth to perform the same level of optimistations we can do easily higher up the stack.

Quoted 6 lines

IOWs, IMO anywhere there is a context with significant queue of IO, that's where we should be doing a better job of sorting before that IO is dispatched to the lower layers. This is still no guarantee of better IO (e.g. if the filesystem fragments the file) but it does give the lower layers a far better chance at optimal allocation and scheduling of IO...

None of what you said had much to do with what I said.

What you've described are implementation problems in the current block layer because it conflates "sorting" with "queueing". I'm saying "fix that".

And... sorting at the block layer will always be superior to sorting at the pagecache layer because the block layer sorts at the physical block level and can handle not-well-laid-out files and can sort and merge pages from different address_spaces.

Still, I suspect none of it will improve anything anyway. Those pages are still dirty, possibly-locked and need to go to disk. It doesn't matter from the MM POV whether they sit in some VM list or in the request queue.

Possibly there may be some benefit to not putting so many of these unreclaimable pages into the queue all at the the same time. But that's a shortcoming in the block code: we should be able to shove arbitrary numbers of dirty page (segments) into the queue and not gum the system up. Don't try to work around that in the VM.

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#54 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 45 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 36 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:39:43 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 10 lines · Andrew Morton

On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:11:44 +1000

Quoted 4 lines

10-15% reduction in seeks on simple kernel compile workloads. This shows that if we optimise IO patterns at higher layers where the sort window is much, much larger than in the IO scheduler, then overall system performance improves....

Yup.

But then, this all really should be done at the block layer so other io-submitting-paths can benefit from it.

That was what we did in the past with really, really deep IO scheduler queues. That leads to IO latency and OOM problems because we could lock gigabytes of memory away under IO and take minutes to clean it.

Besides, there really isn't the right context in the block layer to be able to queue and prioritise large amounts of IO without significant penalties to some higher layer operation.

Quoted 1 line

IOW, maybe "the sort queue is the submission queue" wasn't a good idea.

Perhaps, but IMO sorting should be done where the context allows it to be done most efficiently. Sorting is most effective when ever a significant queue of IO is formed, whether it be in the filesystem, the VFS, the VM or the block layer because the IO stack is very much a GIGO queue.

Simply put, there's nothing the lower layers can do to optimise bad IO patterns from the higher layers because they have small sort windows which are necessary to keep IO latency in check. Hence if the higher layers feed the lower layers crap they simply don't have the context or depth to perform the same level of optimistations we can do easily higher up the stack.

Quoted 6 lines

IOWs, IMO anywhere there is a context with significant queue of IO, that's where we should be doing a better job of sorting before that IO is dispatched to the lower layers. This is still no guarantee of better IO (e.g. if the filesystem fragments the file) but it does give the lower layers a far better chance at optimal allocation and scheduling of IO...

Quoted 5 lines

None of what you said had much to do with what I said.

What you've described are implementation problems in the current block layer because it conflates "sorting" with "queueing". I'm saying "fix that".

You can't sort until you've queued.

Quoted 4 lines

And... sorting at the block layer will always be superior to sorting at the pagecache layer because the block layer sorts at the physical block level and can handle not-well-laid-out files and can sort and merge pages from different address_spaces.

Yes it, can do that. And it still does that even if the higher layers sort their I/O dispatch better,

Filesystems try very hard to allocate adjacent logical offsets in a file in adjacent physical blocks on disk - that's the whole point of extent-indexed filesystems. Hence with modern filesystems there is generally a direct correlation between the page {mapping,index} tuple and the physical location of the mapped block.

i.e. there is generally zero physical correlation between pages in different mappings, but there is a high physical correlation between the index of pages on the same mapping. Hence by sorting where we have a {mapping,index} context, we push out IO that is much more likely to be in contiguous physical chunks that the current random page shootdown.

We optimise applications to use these sorts of correlations all the time to improve IO patterns. Why can't we make the same sort of optmisations to the IO that the VM issues?

Quoted 4 lines

Still, I suspect none of it will improve anything anyway. Those pages are still dirty, possibly-locked and need to go to disk. It doesn't matter from the MM POV whether they sit in some VM list or in the request queue.

Oh, but it does.....

Quoted 5 lines

Possibly there may be some benefit to not putting so many of these unreclaimable pages into the queue all at the the same time. But that's a shortcoming in the block code: we should be able to shove arbitrary numbers of dirty page (segments) into the queue and not gum the system up. Don't try to work around that in the VM.

I think you know perfectly well why the system gums up when we increase block layer queue depth: it's the fact that the _VM_ relies on block layer queue congestion to limit the amount of dirty memory in the system.

We've got a feedback loop between the block layer and the VM that only works if block device queues are kept shallow. Keeping the number of dirty pages under control is a VM responsibility, but it is putting limitations on the block layer to ensure that the VM works correctly. If you want the block layer to have deep queues, then someone needs to fix the VM not to require knowledge of the internal operation of the block layer for correct operation.

Adding a few lines of code to sort a list in the VM is far, far easier than redesigning the write throttling code....

Cheers,

Dave.

Signature · 8 lines
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#55 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 11 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:20:34 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 10 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 7 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:39:43 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:

IOWs, IMO anywhere there is a context with significant queue of IO, that's where we should be doing a better job of sorting before that IO is dispatched to the lower layers. This is still no guarantee of better IO (e.g. if the filesystem fragments the file) but it does give the lower layers a far better chance at optimal allocation and scheduling of IO...

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 5 lines

None of what you said had much to do with what I said.

What you've described are implementation problems in the current block layer because it conflates "sorting" with "queueing". I'm saying "fix that".

You can't sort until you've queued.

Yes you can. That's exactly what you're recommending! Only you're recommending doing it at the wrong level. The fs-writeback radix-tree walks do it at the wrong level too. Sorting should be done within, or in a layer above the block queues, not within the large number of individual callers.

Quoted 14 lines
Quoted 4 lines

And... sorting at the block layer will always be superior to sorting at the pagecache layer because the block layer sorts at the physical block level and can handle not-well-laid-out files and can sort and merge pages from different address_spaces.

Yes it, can do that. And it still does that even if the higher layers sort their I/O dispatch better,

Filesystems try very hard to allocate adjacent logical offsets in a file in adjacent physical blocks on disk - that's the whole point of extent-indexed filesystems. Hence with modern filesystems there is generally a direct correlation between the page {mapping,index} tuple and the physical location of the mapped block.

Quoted 3 lines

i.e. there is generally zero physical correlation between pages in different mappings, but there is a high physical correlation between the index of pages on the same mapping.

Nope. Large-number-of-small-files is a pretty common case. If the fs doesn't handle that well (ie: by placing them nearby on disk), it's borked.

Quoted 8 lines

Hence by sorting
where we have a {mapping,index} context, we push out IO that is much more likely to be in contiguous physical chunks that the current random page shootdown.

We optimise applications to use these sorts of correlations all the time to improve IO patterns. Why can't we make the same sort of optmisations to the IO that the VM issues?

We can, but it shouldn't be specific to page reclaim. Other places submit IO too, and want the same treatment.

Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 4 lines

Still, I suspect none of it will improve anything anyway. Those pages are still dirty, possibly-locked and need to go to disk. It doesn't matter from the MM POV whether they sit in some VM list or in the request queue.

Oh, but it does.....

The only difference is that pages which are in the queue (current implementation thereof) can't be shot down by truncate.

Quoted 10 lines
Quoted 5 lines

Possibly there may be some benefit to not putting so many of these unreclaimable pages into the queue all at the the same time. But that's a shortcoming in the block code: we should be able to shove arbitrary numbers of dirty page (segments) into the queue and not gum the system up. Don't try to work around that in the VM.

I think you know perfectly well why the system gums up when we increase block layer queue depth: it's the fact that the _VM_ relies on block layer queue congestion to limit the amount of dirty memory in the system.

mm, a little bit still, I guess. Mainly because dirty memory management isn't zone aware, so even though we limit dirty memory globally, a particular zone(set) can get excessively dirtied.

Most of this problem happen on the balance_dirty_pages() path, where we already sort the pages in ascending logical order.

Quoted 10 lines

We've got a feedback loop between the block layer and the VM that only works if block device queues are kept shallow. Keeping the number of dirty pages under control is a VM responsibility, but it is putting limitations on the block layer to ensure that the VM works correctly. If you want the block layer to have deep queues, then someone needs to fix the VM not to require knowledge of the internal operation of the block layer for correct operation.

Adding a few lines of code to sort a list in the VM is far, far easier than redesigning the write throttling code....

It's a hack and a workaround. And I suspect it won't make any difference, especially given Mel's measurements of the number of dirty pages he's seeing coming off the LRU. Although those numbers may well be due to the new quite-low dirty memory thresholds.

It would be interesting to code up a little test patch though, see if there's benefit to be had going down this path.

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#56 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 15 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 13 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:20:34 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 12 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 7 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:39:43 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:

IOWs, IMO anywhere there is a context with significant queue of IO, that's where we should be doing a better job of sorting before that IO is dispatched to the lower layers. This is still no guarantee of better IO (e.g. if the filesystem fragments the file) but it does give the lower layers a far better chance at optimal allocation and scheduling of IO...

None of what you said had much to do with what I said.

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 5 lines
Quoted 3 lines

What you've described are implementation problems in the current block layer because it conflates "sorting" with "queueing". I'm saying "fix that".

You can't sort until you've queued.

Yes you can. That's exactly what you're recommending!

Umm, I suggested sorting a queue dirty pages that was build by reclaim before dispatching them. How does that translate to me recommending "sort before queuing"?

Quoted 2 lines

Only you're
recommending doing it at the wrong level.

If you feed a filesystem garbage IO, you'll get garbage performance and there's nothing that a block layer sort queue can do to fix the damage it does to both performance and filesystem fragmentation levels. It's not just about IO issue - delayed allocation pretty much requires writeback to be issuing well formed IOs to reap the benefits it can provide....

Quoted 14 lines
Quoted 14 lines
Quoted 4 lines

And... sorting at the block layer will always be superior to sorting at the pagecache layer because the block layer sorts at the physical block level and can handle not-well-laid-out files and can sort and merge pages from different address_spaces.

Yes it, can do that. And it still does that even if the higher layers sort their I/O dispatch better,

Filesystems try very hard to allocate adjacent logical offsets in a file in adjacent physical blocks on disk - that's the whole point of extent-indexed filesystems. Hence with modern filesystems there is generally a direct correlation between the page {mapping,index} tuple and the physical location of the mapped block.

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 3 lines

i.e. there is generally zero physical correlation between pages in different mappings, but there is a high physical correlation between the index of pages on the same mapping.

Nope. Large-number-of-small-files is a pretty common case. If the fs doesn't handle that well (ie: by placing them nearby on disk), it's borked.

Filesystems already handle this case just fine as we see it from writeback all the time. Untarring a kernel is a good example of this...

I suggested sorting all the IO to be issued into per-mapping page groups because:
a) makes IO issued from reclaim look almost exactly the same to the filesytem as if writeback is pushing out the IO.
b) it looks to be a trivial addition to the new code.

To me that's a no-brainer.

Quoted 2 lines

It would be interesting to code up a little test patch though, see if there's benefit to be had going down this path.

I doubt Mel's tests cases will show anything - they simply didn't show enough IO issued from reclaim to make any difference.

Cheers,

Dave.

Signature · 8 lines
Dave Chinner
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#57 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 8 lines · Dave Chinner
Quoted 3 lines

Nope. Large-number-of-small-files is a pretty common case. If the fs doesn't handle that well (ie: by placing them nearby on disk), it's borked.

Filesystems already handle this case just fine as we see it from writeback all the time. Untarring a kernel is a good example of this...

Quoted 7 lines

I suggested sorting all the IO to be issued into per-mapping page groups because:
a) makes IO issued from reclaim look almost exactly the same to the filesytem as if writeback is pushing out the IO.
b) it looks to be a trivial addition to the new code.

To me that's a no-brainer.

That doesn't coverup large-number-of-small-files pattern, since untarring subsequently means creating something new, which FS can optimize. Much more interesting case is when we have dirtied large number of small files in kind-of random order and submitted them down to disk.

Per-mapping sorting will not do anything good in this case, even if files were previously created in a good facion being placed closely and so on, and only block layer will find a correlation between adjacent blocks in different files. But with existing queue management it has quite a small opportunity, and that's what I think Andrew is arguing about.

Signature · 1 line
	Evgeniy Polyakov
#58 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 23 lines · Evgeniy Polyakov
Quoted 8 lines · Dave Chinner
Quoted 3 lines

Nope. Large-number-of-small-files is a pretty common case. If the fs doesn't handle that well (ie: by placing them nearby on disk), it's borked.

Filesystems already handle this case just fine as we see it from writeback all the time. Untarring a kernel is a good example of this...

Quoted 7 lines

I suggested sorting all the IO to be issued into per-mapping page groups because:
a) makes IO issued from reclaim look almost exactly the same to the filesytem as if writeback is pushing out the IO.
b) it looks to be a trivial addition to the new code.

To me that's a no-brainer.

That doesn't coverup large-number-of-small-files pattern, since untarring subsequently means creating something new, which FS can optimize. Much more interesting case is when we have dirtied large number of small files in kind-of random order and submitted them down to disk.

Quoted 6 lines

Per-mapping sorting will not do anything good in this case, even if files were previously created in a good facion being placed closely and so on, and only block layer will find a correlation between adjacent blocks in different files. But with existing queue management it has quite a small opportunity, and that's what I think Andrew is arguing about.

The solution is not to sort pages on their way to be submitted either, really.

What I do in fsblock is to maintain a block-nr sorted tree of dirty blocks. This works nicely because fsblock dirty state is properly synchronized with page dirty state. So writeout can just walk this in order and it provides pretty optimal submission pattern of any interleavings of data and metadata. No need for buffer boundary or hacks like that. (needs some intelligence for delalloc, though).

But even with all that, it's not the complete story. It doesn't know about direct IO, sync IO, or fsyncs, and it would be very hard and ugly to try to synchronise and sort all that from the pagecache level. It also is a heuristic in terms of optimal block scheduling behaviour. With smarter devices and drivers there might be better ways to go.

So what is needed is to get as much info into the block layer as possible. As Andrew says, there shouldn't be such a big difference between pages being writeback or dirty in pagecache.

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#59 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 7 lines · Nick Piggin

What I do in fsblock is to maintain a block-nr sorted tree of dirty blocks. This works nicely because fsblock dirty state is properly synchronized with page dirty state. So writeout can just walk this in order and it provides pretty optimal submission pattern of any interleavings of data and metadata. No need for buffer boundary or hacks like that. (needs some intelligence for delalloc, though).

I think worrying about indirect blocks really doesn't matter much these days. For one thing extent based filesystems have a lot less of these, and second for a journaling filesystem we only need to log modification to the indirect blocks and not actually write them back in place during the sync. At least for XFS the actual writeback can happen a lot later, as part of the ordered list of delwri buffers.

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#60 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 9 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 7 lines · Nick Piggin

What I do in fsblock is to maintain a block-nr sorted tree of dirty blocks. This works nicely because fsblock dirty state is properly synchronized with page dirty state. So writeout can just walk this in order and it provides pretty optimal submission pattern of any interleavings of data and metadata. No need for buffer boundary or hacks like that. (needs some intelligence for delalloc, though).

Quoted 6 lines

I think worrying about indirect blocks really doesn't matter much these days. For one thing extent based filesystems have a lot less of these, and second for a journaling filesystem we only need to log modification to the indirect blocks and not actually write them back in place during the sync. At least for XFS the actual writeback can happen a lot later, as part of the ordered list of delwri buffers.

That's true, more importantly I meant any interleavings of data from more than one file too.

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#61 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Nick Piggin
Quoted 9 lines · Nick Piggin
Quoted 7 lines · Evgeniy Polyakov

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 04:36:43PM +1000, Dave Chinner ([email protected]) wrote:
Per-mapping sorting will not do anything good in this case, even if files were previously created in a good facion being placed closely and so on, and only block layer will find a correlation between adjacent blocks in different files. But with existing queue management it has quite a small opportunity, and that's what I think Andrew is arguing about.

Quoted 6 lines

The solution is not to sort pages on their way to be submitted either, really.

What I do in fsblock is to maintain a block-nr sorted tree of dirty blocks. This works nicely because fsblock dirty state is properly synchronized with page dirty state.

How does this work with delayed allocation where there is no block number associated with the page until writeback calls the allocation routine?

Cheers,

Dave.

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Dave Chinner
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#62 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 13 lines · Dave Chinner
Quoted 12 lines · Nick Piggin
Quoted 7 lines · Evgeniy Polyakov

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 04:36:43PM +1000, Dave Chinner ([email protected]) wrote:
Per-mapping sorting will not do anything good in this case, even if files were previously created in a good facion being placed closely and so on, and only block layer will find a correlation between adjacent blocks in different files. But with existing queue management it has quite a small opportunity, and that's what I think Andrew is arguing about.

The solution is not to sort pages on their way to be submitted either, really.

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 3 lines

What I do in fsblock is to maintain a block-nr sorted tree of dirty blocks. This works nicely because fsblock dirty state is properly synchronized with page dirty state.

How does this work with delayed allocation where there is no block number associated with the page until writeback calls the allocation routine?

It doesn't. I have been thinking about how best to make that work. The mm/writeback is not in a good position to know what to do, so the fs would have to help.

So either an fs callback, or the fs would have to insert the blocks (or some marker) into the tree itself. It's relatively easy to do for a single file (just walk the radix-tree and do delalloc conversions), but between multiple files is harder (current code has the same problem though).

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#63 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Evgeniy Polyakov
Quoted 5 lines · Evgeniy Polyakov

That doesn't coverup large-number-of-small-files pattern, since untarring subsequently means creating something new, which FS can optimize. Much more interesting case is when we have dirtied large number of small files in kind-of random order and submitted them down to disk.

That's why we still have block layer sorting. But for the problem of larger files doing the sorting above the filesystem is a lot more efficient, not just primarily due to the I/O patters but because it makes life for the filesystem writeback code and allocator a lot simpler.

Quoted 6 lines

Per-mapping sorting will not do anything good in this case, even if files were previously created in a good facion being placed closely and so on, and only block layer will find a correlation between adjacent blocks in different files. But with existing queue management it has quite a small opportunity, and that's what I think Andrew is arguing about.

Which is actually more or less true - if we do larger amounts of writeback from kswapd we're toast anyway and performance and allocation patters go down the toilet. Then again throwing a list_sort in is a rather trivial addition. Note that in addition to page->index we can also sort by the inode number in the sort function. At least for XFS and the traditional ufs derived allocators that will give you additional locality for small files.

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author
#64 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Andrew Morton
Quoted 97 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 11 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:20:34 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 10 lines · Andrew Morton
Quoted 7 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:39:43 +1000 Dave Chinner <[email protected]> wrote:

IOWs, IMO anywhere there is a context with significant queue of IO, that's where we should be doing a better job of sorting before that IO is dispatched to the lower layers. This is still no guarantee of better IO (e.g. if the filesystem fragments the file) but it does give the lower layers a far better chance at optimal allocation and scheduling of IO...

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 5 lines

None of what you said had much to do with what I said.

What you've described are implementation problems in the current block layer because it conflates "sorting" with "queueing". I'm saying "fix that".

You can't sort until you've queued.

Yes you can. That's exactly what you're recommending! Only you're recommending doing it at the wrong level. The fs-writeback radix-tree walks do it at the wrong level too. Sorting should be done within, or in a layer above the block queues, not within the large number of individual callers.

Quoted 14 lines
Quoted 4 lines

And... sorting at the block layer will always be superior to sorting at the pagecache layer because the block layer sorts at the physical block level and can handle not-well-laid-out files and can sort and merge pages from different address_spaces.

Yes it, can do that. And it still does that even if the higher layers sort their I/O dispatch better,

Filesystems try very hard to allocate adjacent logical offsets in a file in adjacent physical blocks on disk - that's the whole point of extent-indexed filesystems. Hence with modern filesystems there is generally a direct correlation between the page {mapping,index} tuple and the physical location of the mapped block.

Quoted 3 lines

i.e. there is generally zero physical correlation between pages in different mappings, but there is a high physical correlation between the index of pages on the same mapping.

Nope. Large-number-of-small-files is a pretty common case. If the fs doesn't handle that well (ie: by placing them nearby on disk), it's borked.

Quoted 8 lines

Hence by sorting
where we have a {mapping,index} context, we push out IO that is much more likely to be in contiguous physical chunks that the current random page shootdown.

We optimise applications to use these sorts of correlations all the time to improve IO patterns. Why can't we make the same sort of optmisations to the IO that the VM issues?

We can, but it shouldn't be specific to page reclaim. Other places submit IO too, and want the same treatment.

Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 4 lines

Still, I suspect none of it will improve anything anyway. Those pages are still dirty, possibly-locked and need to go to disk. It doesn't matter from the MM POV whether they sit in some VM list or in the request queue.

Oh, but it does.....

The only difference is that pages which are in the queue (current implementation thereof) can't be shot down by truncate.

Quoted 10 lines
Quoted 5 lines

Possibly there may be some benefit to not putting so many of these unreclaimable pages into the queue all at the the same time. But that's a shortcoming in the block code: we should be able to shove arbitrary numbers of dirty page (segments) into the queue and not gum the system up. Don't try to work around that in the VM.

I think you know perfectly well why the system gums up when we increase block layer queue depth: it's the fact that the _VM_ relies on block layer queue congestion to limit the amount of dirty memory in the system.

mm, a little bit still, I guess. Mainly because dirty memory management isn't zone aware, so even though we limit dirty memory globally, a particular zone(set) can get excessively dirtied.

Most of this problem happen on the balance_dirty_pages() path, where we already sort the pages in ascending logical order.

Quoted 8 lines

We've got a feedback loop between the block layer and the VM that only works if block device queues are kept shallow. Keeping the number of dirty pages under control is a VM responsibility, but it is putting limitations on the block layer to ensure that the VM works correctly. If you want the block layer to have deep queues, then someone needs to fix the VM not to require knowledge of the internal operation of the block layer for correct operation.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 2 lines

Adding a few lines of code to sort a list in the VM is far, far easier than redesigning the write throttling code....

It's a hack and a workaround. And I suspect it won't make any difference, especially given Mel's measurements of the number of dirty pages he's seeing coming off the LRU. Although those numbers may well be due to the new quite-low dirty memory thresholds.

I tested with a dirty ratio of 40 but I didn't see a major problem. It's still a case with the tests I saw that direct reclaim of dirty pages was a relatively rare event except when lumpy reclaim was involved. What did change is the amount of scanning the direct reclaim and kswapd had to do (both increased quite a bit) but the percentage of dirty pages encountered was roughly the same (1-2% of scanned pages were dirty in the case of sysbench).

This is sysbench only rather than flooding with more data.

DIRTY RATIO == 20
FTrace Reclaim Statistics
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims 9843 13398 51651
Direct reclaim pages scanned 871367 1008709 3080593
Direct reclaim write async I/O 24883 30699 0
Direct reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0
Wake kswapd requests 7070819 6961672 11268341
Kswapd wakeups 1578 1500 943
Kswapd pages scanned 22016558 21779455 17393431
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O 1161346 1101641 1717759
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0
Time stalled direct reclaim (ms) 26.11 45.04 2.97
Time kswapd awake (ms) 5105.06 5135.93 6086.32

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 734.52 712.39 703.9
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 9710.02 9589.20 9334.45
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.06% 0.00% 0.00%

DIRTY RATIO == 40
FTrace Reclaim Statistics
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims 29945 41887 163006
Direct reclaim pages scanned 2853804 3075288 13142072
Direct reclaim write async I/O 51498 63662 0
Direct reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0
Wake kswapd requests 11899105 12466894 15645364
Kswapd wakeups 945 891 522
Kswapd pages scanned 20401921 20674788 11319791
Kswapd reclaim write async I/O 1381897 1332436 1711266
Kswapd reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0
Time stalled direct reclaim (ms) 131.78 165.08 5.47
Time kswapd awake (ms) 6321.11 6413.79 6687.67

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 709.91 718.39 664.28
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 9579.90 9700.42 9101.05
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.07% 0.00% 0.00%

I guess what was really interesting was that even though raising the dirty ratio allowed the test to complete faster, the percentage of time spent in direct reclaim increased quite a lot. Again, just stopping writeback in direct reclaim seemed to help.

Quoted 3 lines

It would be interesting to code up a little test patch though, see if there's benefit to be had going down this path.

I'll do this just to see what it looks like. To be frank, I lack taste when it comes to how the block layer and filesystem should behave so am having troube deciding if sorting the pages prior to submission is a good thing or if it would just encourage bad or lax behaviour in the IO submission queueing.

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#65 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 7 lines · Mel Gorman

I'll do this just to see what it looks like. To be frank, I lack taste when it comes to how the block layer and filesystem should behave so am having troube deciding if sorting the pages prior to submission is a good thing or if it would just encourage bad or lax behaviour in the IO submission queueing.

I suspect the right answer is we need to sort both at the block layer and either (a) before you pass things to the filesystem layer, or if you don't do that (b) the filesystem will be forced to do its own queuing/sorting at the very least for delayed allocation pages, so the allocator can do something sane. And given that there are multiple file systems that support delayed allocation, it would be nice if this could be recognized by the writeback code, as opposed to having btrfs, xfs, ext4, all having to implement something very similar at the fs layer.

- Ted

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author
#66 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 11 lines · Mel Gorman

<SNIP on whether sorting should be in page cache or block layer>

Quoted 3 lines

It would be interesting to code up a little test patch though, see if there's benefit to be had going down this path.

I'll do this just to see what it looks like. To be frank, I lack taste when it comes to how the block layer and filesystem should behave so am having troube deciding if sorting the pages prior to submission is a good thing or if it would just encourage bad or lax behaviour in the IO submission queueing.

The patch to sort the list being cleaned by reclaim looks like this. It's not actually tested

vmscan: Sort pages being queued for IO before submitting to the filesystem

While page reclaim submits dirty pages in batch, it doesn't change the order in which the IO is issued - it is still issued in LRU order. Given that they are issued in a short period of time now, rather than across a longer scan period, it is likely that it will not be any faster as:

a) IO will not be started as soon, and
b) the IO scheduler still only has a small re-ordering window and will choke just as much on random IO patterns.

This patch uses list_sort() function to sort
the list; sorting the list of pages by mapping and page->index within the mapping would result in all the pages on each mapping being sent down in ascending offset order at once - exactly how the filesystems want IO to be sent to it.

Credit mostly goes to Dave Chinner for this idea and the changelog text.

----

mm/vmscan.c +31 -0
index 68b3d22..02ab246 100644
@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@
 #include <linux/topology.h>
 #include <linux/cpu.h>
 #include <linux/cpuset.h>
+#include <linux/list_sort.h>
 #include <linux/notifier.h>
 #include <linux/rwsem.h>
 #include <linux/delay.h>
@@ -651,6 +652,34 @@ static noinline_for_stack void free_page_list(struct list_head *free_pages)
 		__pagevec_free(&freed_pvec);
 }
 
+/* Sort based on mapping then index */
+static int page_writeback_cmp(void *data, struct list_head *a, struct list_head *b)
+{
+	struct page *ap = list_entry(a, struct page, lru);
+	struct page *bp = list_entry(b, struct page, lru);
+	pgoff_t diff;
+
+	/*
+	 * Page not locked but it's not critical, the mapping is just for sorting
+	 * If the mapping is no longer valid, it's of little consequence
+	 */
+	if (ap->mapping != bp->mapping) {
+		if (ap->mapping < bp->mapping)
+			return -1;
+		if (ap->mapping > bp->mapping)
+			return 1;
+		return 0;
+	}
+	
+	/* Then index */
+	diff = ap->index - bp->index;
+	if (diff < 0)
+		return -1;
+	if (diff > 0)
+		return 1;
+	return 0;
+}
+
 static noinline_for_stack void clean_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 				struct scan_control *sc)
 {
@@ -660,6 +689,8 @@ static noinline_for_stack void clean_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 	if (!sc->may_writepage)
 		return;
 
+	list_sort(NULL, page_list, page_writeback_cmp);
+
 	/* Write the pages out to disk in ranges where possible */
 	while (!list_empty(page_list)) {
 		struct address_space *mapping;

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#67 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Andrew Morton
Quoted 6 lines · Andrew Morton

Yup.

But then, this all really should be done at the block layer so other io-submitting-paths can benefit from it.

IOW, maybe "the sort queue is the submission queue" wasn't a good idea.

Even if has not effect on the actual I/O patters it has a massive benefit for the filesystem. When probing delalloc/unwritten space at least XFS does try to convert a larger extent forward from the index, but doesn't bother to go backwards. By providing the trivial sort here we make life a lot easier for the filesystem.

In addition to that we do get better I/O patters especially with short queues as smart writepage implementatons will also submit the next few pages, which is essentially free given how the storage works. This means we already have a page cleaned before we might even submit it without sorting.

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#68 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Mel Gorman

mm/vmscan.c typedef enum { · line 348

Quoted 5 lines
mm/vmscan.c +5 -0
+	/*
+	 * XXX: This is the Holy Hand Grenade of PotentiallyInvalidMapping. As
+	 * the page lock has been dropped by ->writepage, that mapping could
+	 * be anything
+	 */

Why is this an XXX comment?

mm/vmscan.c typedef enum { · line 367

Quoted 12 lines
mm/vmscan.c +12 -0
+	/*
+	 * Wait on writeback if requested to. This happens when
+	 * direct reclaiming a large contiguous area and the
+	 * first attempt to free a range of pages fails.
+	 */
+	if (PageWriteback(page) && sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC)
+		wait_on_page_writeback(page);
+
+	if (!PageWriteback(page)) {
+		/* synchronous write or broken a_ops? */
+		ClearPageReclaim(page);
+	}

how about:

	if (PageWriteback(page) {
		if (sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC)
			wait_on_page_writeback(page);
	} else {
		/* synchronous write or broken a_ops? */
		ClearPageReclaim(page);
	}

mm/vmscan.c static pageout_t pageout(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,

Quoted 6 lines
mm/vmscan.c +2 -0
 	if (!may_write_to_queue(mapping->backing_dev_info))
 		return PAGE_KEEP;
 
 /*
+ * Clean a list of pages. It is expected that all the pages on page_list have been
+ * locked as part of isolation from the LRU.

A rather pointless line of 80 chars. I see the point for long string literals, but here's it's just a pain.

Quoted 2 lines

+ *
+ * XXX: Is there a problem with holding multiple page locks like this?

I think there is. There's quite a few places that do hold multiple pages locked, but they always lock pages in increasing page->inxex order. Given that this locks basically in random order it could cause problems for those places.

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author
#69 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

Quoted 8 lines · Christoph Hellwig

mm/vmscan.c typedef enum { · line 348

Quoted 5 lines
mm/vmscan.c +5 -0
+	/*
+	 * XXX: This is the Holy Hand Grenade of PotentiallyInvalidMapping. As
+	 * the page lock has been dropped by ->writepage, that mapping could
+	 * be anything
+	 */

Why is this an XXX comment?

With the page lock released, the mapping may be no longer valid. Nick posted a patch in relation to it that I need to look at. The comment was because Andrew highlight that this was buggy and I wanted to make sure I didn't forget about it.

Quoted 15 lines

mm/vmscan.c typedef enum { · line 367

Quoted 12 lines
mm/vmscan.c +12 -0
+	/*
+	 * Wait on writeback if requested to. This happens when
+	 * direct reclaiming a large contiguous area and the
+	 * first attempt to free a range of pages fails.
+	 */
+	if (PageWriteback(page) && sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC)
+		wait_on_page_writeback(page);
+
+	if (!PageWriteback(page)) {
+		/* synchronous write or broken a_ops? */
+		ClearPageReclaim(page);
+	}

how about:

Quoted 8 lines
	if (PageWriteback(page) {
		if (sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC)
			wait_on_page_writeback(page);
	} else {
		/* synchronous write or broken a_ops? */
		ClearPageReclaim(page);
	}

Sure, that's tidier.

Quoted 10 lines

mm/vmscan.c static pageout_t pageout(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,

Quoted 6 lines
mm/vmscan.c +2 -0
 	if (!may_write_to_queue(mapping->backing_dev_info))
 		return PAGE_KEEP;
 
 /*
+ * Clean a list of pages. It is expected that all the pages on page_list have been
+ * locked as part of isolation from the LRU.

A rather pointless line of 80 chars. I see the point for long string literals, but here's it's just a pain.

I'll trim it.

Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 2 lines

+ *
+ * XXX: Is there a problem with holding multiple page locks like this?

I think there is. There's quite a few places that do hold multiple pages locked, but they always lock pages in increasing page->inxex order. Given that this locks basically in random order it could cause problems for those places.

Hmm, ok. In that case, I'll have to release the locks on the list and reacquire them. It was something I would have preferred to avoid. Thanks

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#70 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 11/12] vmscan: Write out dirty pages in batch

In reply to Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 7 lines · Christoph Hellwig

mm/vmscan.c typedef enum { · line 348

Quoted 5 lines
mm/vmscan.c +5 -0
+	/*
+	 * XXX: This is the Holy Hand Grenade of PotentiallyInvalidMapping. As
+	 * the page lock has been dropped by ->writepage, that mapping could
+	 * be anything
+	 */

Why is this an XXX comment?

It's just a pretty simple use-after-free. Maybe people forget it because ->writepage is an asynchronous API.

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 2 lines

+ *
+ * XXX: Is there a problem with holding multiple page locks like this?

I think there is. There's quite a few places that do hold multiple pages locked, but they always lock pages in increasing page->inxex order. Given that this locks basically in random order it could cause problems for those places.

There shouldn't be a problem _holding_ the locks, but there is a problem waiting for multiple locks out of page->index order.

But there is a problem with holding the lock of a lot of pages while calling ->writepage on them. So yeah, you can't do that.

Hmm, I should rediff that lockdep page_lock patch and get it merged. (although I don't know if that can catch these all these problems easily)

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author
#71 lore raw

PATCH 12/12 vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

In reply to Mel Gorman

When memory is under enough pressure, a process may enter direct reclaim to free pages in the same manner kswapd does. If a dirty page is encountered during the scan, this page is written to backing storage using mapping->writepage. This can result in very deep call stacks, particularly if the target storage or filesystem are complex. It has already been observed on XFS that the stack overflows but the problem is not XFS-specific.

This patch prevents direct reclaim writing back pages by not setting may_writepage in scan_control. Instead, dirty pages are placed back on the LRU lists for either background writing by the BDI threads or kswapd. If in direct lumpy reclaim and dirty pages are encountered, the process will kick the background flushter threads before trying again.

Memory control groups do not have a kswapd-like thread nor do pages get direct reclaimed from the page allocator. Instead, memory control group pages are reclaimed when the quota is being exceeded or the group is being shrunk. As it is not expected that the entry points into page reclaim are deep call chains memcg is still allowed to writeback dirty pages.

---
 mm/vmscan.c |   76 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
 1 files changed, 57 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)
mm/vmscan.c +57 -19
index 4856a2a..574e816 100644
@@ -372,6 +372,12 @@ int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
 	return PAGE_SUCCESS;
 }
 
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}
+
 /*
  * pageout is called by shrink_page_list() for each dirty page.
  * Calls ->writepage().
@@ -701,6 +707,9 @@ static noinline_for_stack void clean_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 	list_splice(&ret_pages, page_list);
 }
 
+/* Direct lumpy reclaim waits up to a second for background cleaning */
+#define MAX_SWAP_CLEAN_WAIT 10
+
 /*
  * shrink_page_list() returns the number of reclaimed pages
  */
@@ -711,15 +720,16 @@ static unsigned long shrink_page_list(struct list_head *page_list,
 	LIST_HEAD(free_pages);
 	LIST_HEAD(putback_pages);
 	LIST_HEAD(dirty_pages);
-	struct list_head *ret_list = page_list;
 	int pgactivate;
-	bool cleaned = false;
+	int cleaned = 0;
+	unsigned long nr_dirty;
 	unsigned long nr_reclaimed = 0;
 
 	pgactivate = 0;
 	cond_resched();
 
 restart_dirty:
+	nr_dirty = 0;
 	while (!list_empty(page_list)) {
 		enum page_references references;
 		struct address_space *mapping;
@@ -811,12 +821,17 @@ restart_dirty:
 		if (PageDirty(page))  {
 			/*
 			 * On the first pass, dirty pages are put on a separate
-			 * list. IO is then queued based on ranges of pages for
-			 * each unique mapping in the list
+			 * list. If kswapd, IO is then queued based on ranges of
+			 * pages for each unique mapping in the list. Direct
+			 * reclaimers put the dirty pages back on the list for
+			 * cleaning by kswapd
 			 */
-			if (!cleaned) {
-				/* Keep locked for clean_page_list */
+			if (cleaned < MAX_SWAP_CLEAN_WAIT) {
+				/* Keep locked for kswapd to call clean_page_list */
+				if (!reclaim_can_writeback(sc))
+					unlock_page(page);
 				list_add(&page->lru, &dirty_pages);
+				nr_dirty++;
 				goto keep_dirty;
 			}
 
@@ -935,17 +950,41 @@ keep_dirty:
 		VM_BUG_ON(PageLRU(page) || PageUnevictable(page));
 	}
 
-	if (!cleaned && !list_empty(&dirty_pages)) {
-		clean_page_list(&dirty_pages, sc);
-		page_list = &dirty_pages;
-		cleaned = true;
-		goto restart_dirty;
+	if (cleaned < MAX_SWAP_CLEAN_WAIT && !list_empty(&dirty_pages)) {
+		/*
+		 * Only kswapd cleans pages. Direct reclaimers entering the filesystem
+		 * potentially splices two expensive call-chains and busts the stack
+		 * so instead they go to sleep to give background cleaning a chance
+		 */
+		list_splice(&dirty_pages, page_list);
+		INIT_LIST_HEAD(&dirty_pages);
+		if (reclaim_can_writeback(sc)) {
+			cleaned = MAX_SWAP_CLEAN_WAIT;
+			clean_page_list(page_list, sc);
+			goto restart_dirty;
+		} else {
+			cleaned++;
+			/*
+			 * If lumpy reclaiming, kick the background flusher and wait
+			 * for the pages to be cleaned
+			 *
+		 	 * XXX: kswapd won't find these isolated pages but the
+		 	 * 	background flusher does not prioritise pages. It'd
+		 	 * 	be nice to prioritise a list of pages somehow
+		 	 */
+			if (sync_writeback == PAGEOUT_IO_SYNC) {
+				wakeup_flusher_threads(nr_dirty);
+				congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/10);
+				goto restart_dirty;
+			}
+		}
 	}
-	BUG_ON(!list_empty(&dirty_pages));
 
 	free_page_list(&free_pages);
 
-	list_splice(&putback_pages, ret_list);
+	list_splice(&dirty_pages, page_list);
+	list_splice(&putback_pages, page_list);
+
 	count_vm_events(PGACTIVATE, pgactivate);
 	return nr_reclaimed;
 }
@@ -1954,10 +1993,8 @@ static unsigned long do_try_to_free_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist,
 		 * writeout.  So in laptop mode, write out the whole world.
 		 */
 		writeback_threshold = sc->nr_to_reclaim + sc->nr_to_reclaim / 2;
-		if (total_scanned > writeback_threshold) {
+		if (total_scanned > writeback_threshold)
 			wakeup_flusher_threads(laptop_mode ? 0 : total_scanned);
-			sc->may_writepage = 1;
-		}
 
 		/* Take a nap, wait for some writeback to complete */
 		if (!sc->hibernation_mode && sc->nr_scanned &&
@@ -1995,7 +2032,7 @@ unsigned long try_to_free_pages(struct zonelist *zonelist, int order,
 	unsigned long nr_reclaimed;
 	struct scan_control sc = {
 		.gfp_mask = gfp_mask,
-		.may_writepage = !laptop_mode,
+		.may_writepage = 0,
 		.nr_to_reclaim = SWAP_CLUSTER_MAX,
 		.may_unmap = 1,
 		.may_swap = 1,
@@ -2024,7 +2061,7 @@ unsigned long mem_cgroup_shrink_node_zone(struct mem_cgroup *mem,
 						struct zone *zone, int nid)
 {
 	struct scan_control sc = {
-		.may_writepage = !laptop_mode,
+		.may_writepage = 0,
 		.may_unmap = 1,
 		.may_swap = !noswap,
 		.swappiness = swappiness,
@@ -2676,7 +2713,8 @@ static int __zone_reclaim(struct zone *zone, gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order)
 	struct reclaim_state reclaim_state;
 	int priority;
 	struct scan_control sc = {
-		.may_writepage = !!(zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_WRITE),
+		.may_writepage = (current_is_kswapd() &&
+					(zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_WRITE)),
 		.may_unmap = !!(zone_reclaim_mode & RECLAIM_SWAP),
 		.may_swap = 1,
 		.nr_to_reclaim = max_t(unsigned long, nr_pages,
Signature · 1 line
1.7.1
#72 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 5 lines · Mel Gorman
mm/vmscan.c +0 -0
index 4856a2a..574e816 100644

mm/vmscan.c int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping, · line 380

Quoted 9 lines
mm/vmscan.c +6 -0
@@ -372,6 +372,12 @@ int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
  	return PAGE_SUCCESS;
  }
 
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}
+

I'm not entirely convinced on this bit, but am willing to be convinced by the data.

Signature · 7 lines
All rights reversed

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author
#73 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 10 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 8 lines · Mel Gorman
mm/vmscan.c +0 -0
index 4856a2a..574e816 100644
@@ -372,6 +372,12 @@ int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
  	return PAGE_SUCCESS;
  }
 
Quoted 10 lines

mm/vmscan.c int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping, · line 380

Quoted 6 lines
mm/vmscan.c +6 -0
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}
+

I'm not entirely convinced on this bit, but am willing to be convinced by the data.

Which bit?

You're not convinced that kswapd should be allowed to write back? You're not convinced that memcg should be allowed to write back? You're not convinced that direct reclaim writing back pages can overflow
the stack?

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#74 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 22 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 10 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 8 lines · Mel Gorman
mm/vmscan.c +0 -0
index 4856a2a..574e816 100644
@@ -372,6 +372,12 @@ int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
   	return PAGE_SUCCESS;
   }
 
Quoted 10 lines

mm/vmscan.c int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping, · line 380

Quoted 6 lines
mm/vmscan.c +6 -0
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}
+

I'm not entirely convinced on this bit, but am willing to be convinced by the data.

Quoted 6 lines

Which bit?

You're not convinced that kswapd should be allowed to write back? You're not convinced that memcg should be allowed to write back? You're not convinced that direct reclaim writing back pages can overflow
the stack?

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

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#75 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 5 lines · Rik van Riel

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

Can you explain what the hell memcg reclaim is and why it needs to reclaim from random contexts?
It seems everything that has a cg in it's name that I stumbled over lately seems to be some ugly wart..

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#76 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 9 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 5 lines · Rik van Riel

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

Can you explain what the hell memcg reclaim is and why it needs to reclaim from random contexts?

Kamezawa Hiroyuki has the full story here but here is a summary.

memcg is the Memory Controller cgroup (Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt). It's intended for the control of the amount of memory usable by a group of processes but its behaviour in terms of reclaim differs from global reclaim. It has its own LRU lists and kswapd operates on them. What is surprising is that direct reclaim for a process in the control group also does not operate within the cgroup.

Reclaim from a cgroup happens from the fault path. The new page is "charged" to the cgroup. If it exceeds its allocated resources, some pages within the group are reclaimed in a path that is similar to direct reclaim except for its entry point.

So, memcg is not reclaiming from a random context, there is a limited number of cases where a memcg is reclaiming and it is not expected to overflow the stack.

Quoted 3 lines

It seems everything that has a cg in it's name that I stumbled over lately seems to be some ugly wart..

The wart in this case is that the behaviour of page reclaim within a memcg and globally differ a fair bit.

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Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#77 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 8 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:54:08 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 7 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 5 lines · Rik van Riel

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

Quoted 5 lines
Quoted 2 lines

Can you explain what the hell memcg reclaim is and why it needs to reclaim from random contexts?

Kamezawa Hiroyuki has the full story here but here is a summary.

Thank you.

Quoted 5 lines

memcg is the Memory Controller cgroup (Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt). It's intended for the control of the amount of memory usable by a group of processes but its behaviour in terms of reclaim differs from global reclaim. It has its own LRU lists and kswapd operates on them.

No, we don't use kswapd. But we have some hooks in kswapd for implementing soft-limit. Soft-limit is for giving a hint for kswapd "please reclaim memory from this memcg" when global memory exhausts and kswapd runs.

What a memcg use when it his limit is just direct reclaim.
(*) Justfing using a cpu by a kswapd because a memcg hits limit is difficult
for me. So, I don't use kswapd until now.
When direct-reclaim is used, cost-of-reclaim will be charged against a cpu cgroup which a thread belongs to.

Quoted 3 lines

What is surprising is that direct reclaim
for a process in the control group also does not operate within the cgroup.

Sorry, I can't understand ....

Quoted 6 lines

Reclaim from a cgroup happens from the fault path. The new page is "charged" to the cgroup. If it exceeds its allocated resources, some pages within the group are reclaimed in a path that is similar to direct reclaim except for its entry point.

yes.

Quoted 4 lines

So, memcg is not reclaiming from a random context, there is a limited number of cases where a memcg is reclaiming and it is not expected to overflow the stack.

I think so. Especially, we'll never see 1k stack use of select().

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 3 lines

It seems everything that has a cg in it's name that I stumbled over lately seems to be some ugly wart..

The wart in this case is that the behaviour of page reclaim within a memcg and globally differ a fair bit.

Sorry. But there has been very long story to reach current implementations. But don't worry, of memcg is not activated (not mounted), it doesn't affect the behavior of processes ;)

But Hmm..

Quoted 2 lines

[kamezawa@bluextal mmotm-2.6.35-0611]$ wc -l mm/memcontrol.c 4705 mm/memcontrol.c

may need some diet :(

Thanks,
-Kame

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#78 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

In reply to Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 9 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 5 lines · Rik van Riel

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

Can you explain what the hell memcg reclaim is and why it needs to reclaim from random contexts?

The page fault code will call the cgroup accounting code.

When a cgroup goes over its memory limit, __mem_cgroup_try_charge will call mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim, which will then go into the page reclaim code.

Quoted 2 lines

It seems everything that has a cg in it's name that I stumbled over lately seems to be some ugly wart..

No argument there. It took me a few minutes to find the code path above :)

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author
#79 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

In reply to Rik van Riel
Quoted 30 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 22 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 10 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 8 lines · Mel Gorman
mm/vmscan.c +0 -0
index 4856a2a..574e816 100644
@@ -372,6 +372,12 @@ int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping,
   	return PAGE_SUCCESS;
   }
 
Quoted 10 lines

mm/vmscan.c int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping, · line 380

Quoted 6 lines
mm/vmscan.c +6 -0
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}
+

I'm not entirely convinced on this bit, but am willing to be convinced by the data.

Quoted 6 lines

Which bit?

You're not convinced that kswapd should be allowed to write back? You're not convinced that memcg should be allowed to write back? You're not convinced that direct reclaim writing back pages can overflow
the stack?

Quoted 6 lines

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

What path is taken with memcg != NULL that could overflow the stack? I couldn't spot one but mm/memcontrol.c is a bit tangled so finding all its use cases is tricky. The critical path I had in mind though was direct reclaim and for that path, memcg == NULL or did I miss something?

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#80 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 17 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 15 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 6 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 6 lines

mm/vmscan.c int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping, · line 379

Quoted 6 lines
mm/vmscan.c +5 -0
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

Quoted 4 lines

What path is taken with memcg != NULL that could overflow the stack? I couldn't spot one but mm/memcontrol.c is a bit tangled so finding all its use cases is tricky. The critical path I had in mind though was direct reclaim and for that path, memcg == NULL or did I miss something?

mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim -> try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages

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author
#81 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 18 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 17 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 15 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 6 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 6 lines

mm/vmscan.c int write_reclaim_page(struct page *page, struct address_space *mapping, · line 379

Quoted 6 lines
mm/vmscan.c +5 -0
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 4 lines

What path is taken with memcg != NULL that could overflow the stack? I couldn't spot one but mm/memcontrol.c is a bit tangled so finding all its use cases is tricky. The critical path I had in mind though was direct reclaim and for that path, memcg == NULL or did I miss something?

mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim -> try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages

But in turn, where is mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim called from direct reclaim? It appears to be only called from the fault path or as a result of the memcg changing size.

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#82 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 24 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:16:01 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 23 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 21 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 15 lines · Rik van Riel
Quoted 6 lines · Mel Gorman
Quoted 6 lines

Review

Quoted 6 lines
(quoted diff) +5 -0
+/* kswapd and memcg can writeback as they are unlikely to overflow stack */
+static inline bool reclaim_can_writeback(struct scan_control *sc)
+{
+	return current_is_kswapd() || sc->mem_cgroup != NULL;
+}

If direct reclaim can overflow the stack, so can direct memcg reclaim. That means this patch does not solve the stack overflow, while admitting that we do need the ability to get specific pages flushed to disk from the pageout code.

What path is taken with memcg != NULL that could overflow the stack? I couldn't spot one but mm/memcontrol.c is a bit tangled so finding all its use cases is tricky. The critical path I had in mind though was direct reclaim and for that path, memcg == NULL or did I miss something?

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 2 lines

mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim -> try_to_free_mem_cgroup_pages

But in turn, where is mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim called from direct reclaim? It appears to be only called from the fault path or as a result of the memcg changing size.

yes. It's only called from
- page fault
- add_to_page_cache()

I think we'll see no stack problem. Now, memcg doesn't wakeup kswapd for reclaiming memory, it needs direct writeback.

Thanks,
-Kame

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#83 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 7 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Quoted 4 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:16:01 +0100 Mel Gorman<[email protected]> wrote:

But in turn, where is mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim called from direct reclaim? It appears to be only called from the fault path or as a result of the memcg changing size.

Quoted 6 lines

yes. It's only called from
- page fault
- add_to_page_cache()

I think we'll see no stack problem. Now, memcg doesn't wakeup kswapd for reclaiming memory, it needs direct writeback.

Of course, a memcg page fault could still be triggered from copy_to_user or copy_from_user, with a fairly arbitrary stack frame above...

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#84 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 12 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:29:49 -0400 Rik van Riel <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 11 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Quoted 4 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:16:01 +0100 Mel Gorman<[email protected]> wrote:

But in turn, where is mem_cgroup_hierarchical_reclaim called from direct reclaim? It appears to be only called from the fault path or as a result of the memcg changing size.

yes. It's only called from
- page fault
- add_to_page_cache()

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 2 lines

I think we'll see no stack problem. Now, memcg doesn't wakeup kswapd for reclaiming memory, it needs direct writeback.

Of course, a memcg page fault could still be triggered from copy_to_user or copy_from_user, with a fairly arbitrary stack frame above...

Hmm. But I don't expect copy_from/to_user is called in very deep stack.

Should I prepare a thread for reclaiming memcg pages ? Because we shouldn't limit kswapd's cpu time by CFS cgroup, waking up kswapd just because "a memcg hit limits" isn't fun.

Hmm, or do you recommend no-dirty-page-writeback when a memcg hits limit ? Maybe we'll see much swaps.

I want to go with this for a while, changing memcg's behavior will took some amounts of time, there are only a few developpers.

Thanks,
-Kame

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#85 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 5 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

Hmm, or do you recommend no-dirty-page-writeback when a memcg hits limit ? Maybe we'll see much swaps.

I want to go with this for a while, changing memcg's behavior will took some amounts of time, there are only a few developpers.

One thing we can do, for kswapd, memcg and direct reclaim alike, is to tell the flusher threads to flush pages related to a pageout candidate page to disk.

That way the reclaiming processes can wait on some disk IO to finish, while the flusher thread takes care of the actual flushing.

That should also fix the "kswapd filesystem IO has really poor IO patterns" issue.

There's no reason not to fix this issue the right way.

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#86 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 12 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:53:43 -0400 Rik van Riel <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 5 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

Hmm, or do you recommend no-dirty-page-writeback when a memcg hits limit ? Maybe we'll see much swaps.

I want to go with this for a while, changing memcg's behavior will took some amounts of time, there are only a few developpers.

One thing we can do, for kswapd, memcg and direct reclaim alike, is to tell the flusher threads to flush pages related to a pageout candidate page to disk.

Quoted 8 lines

That way the reclaiming processes can wait on some disk IO to finish, while the flusher thread takes care of the actual flushing.

That should also fix the "kswapd filesystem IO has really poor IO patterns" issue.

There's no reason not to fix this issue the right way.

yes. but this patch just stops writeback. I think it's sane to ask not to change behavior until there are some useful changes in flusher threads.

IMO, until flusher threads can work with I/O cgroup, memcg shoudln't depend on it because writeback allows stealing resource without it.

Thanks,
-Kame

#87 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 21 lines · On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:40:36 +0900 KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki…
Quoted 18 lines · On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:53:43 -0400 Rik van Riel <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 5 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

Hmm, or do you recommend no-dirty-page-writeback when a memcg hits limit ? Maybe we'll see much swaps.

I want to go with this for a while, changing memcg's behavior will took some amounts of time, there are only a few developpers.

One thing we can do, for kswapd, memcg and direct reclaim alike, is to tell the flusher threads to flush pages related to a pageout candidate page to disk.

That way the reclaiming processes can wait on some disk IO to finish, while the flusher thread takes care of the actual flushing.

That should also fix the "kswapd filesystem IO has really poor IO patterns" issue.

Quoted 9 lines
Quoted 2 lines

There's no reason not to fix this issue the right way.

yes. but this patch just stops writeback. I think it's sane to ask not to change behavior until there are some useful changes in flusher threads.

IMO, until flusher threads can work with I/O cgroup, memcg shoudln't depend on it because writeback allows stealing resource without it.

BTW, copy_from_user/copy_to_user is _real_ problem, I'm afraid following much more than memcg.

handle_mm_fault()
-> handle_pte_fault()
-> do_wp_page()
-> balance_dirty_page_rate_limited()
-> balance_dirty_pages()
-> writeback_inodes_wbc()
-> writeback_inodes_wb()
-> writeback_sb_inodes()
-> writeback_single_inode()
-> do_writepages()
-> generic_write_pages()
-> write_cache_pages() // use on-stack pagevec.
-> writepage()

maybe much more stack consuming than memcg->writeback after vmscan.c diet.

Bye.
-Kame

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#88 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 16 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

BTW, copy_from_user/copy_to_user is _real_ problem, I'm afraid following much more than memcg.

handle_mm_fault()
-> handle_pte_fault()
-> do_wp_page()
-> balance_dirty_page_rate_limited()
-> balance_dirty_pages()
-> writeback_inodes_wbc()
-> writeback_inodes_wb()
-> writeback_sb_inodes()
-> writeback_single_inode()
-> do_writepages()
-> generic_write_pages()
-> write_cache_pages() // use on-stack pagevec.
-> writepage()

Yes, this is a massive issue. Strangely enough I just wondered about this callstack as balance_dirty_pages is the only place calling into the per-bdi/sb writeback code directly instead of offloading it to the flusher threads. It's something that should be fixed rather quickly IMHO. write_cache_pages and other bits of this writeback code can use quite large amounts of stack.

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#89 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 18 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 16 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

BTW, copy_from_user/copy_to_user is _real_ problem, I'm afraid following much more than memcg.

handle_mm_fault()
-> handle_pte_fault()
-> do_wp_page()
-> balance_dirty_page_rate_limited()
-> balance_dirty_pages()
-> writeback_inodes_wbc()
-> writeback_inodes_wb()
-> writeback_sb_inodes()
-> writeback_single_inode()
-> do_writepages()
-> generic_write_pages()
-> write_cache_pages() // use on-stack pagevec.
-> writepage()

Quoted 6 lines

Yes, this is a massive issue. Strangely enough I just wondered about this callstack as balance_dirty_pages is the only place calling into the per-bdi/sb writeback code directly instead of offloading it to the flusher threads. It's something that should be fixed rather quickly IMHO. write_cache_pages and other bits of this writeback code can use quite large amounts of stack.

I've had the same thought as well, bdp() should just signal a writeback instead. Much cleaner than doing cleaning from that point.

Signature · 7 lines
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#90 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

In reply to KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Quoted 1 line · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

Hmm. But I don't expect copy_from/to_user is called in very deep stack.

Actually it is. The poll code mentioned earlier in this thread is just want nasty example. I'm pretty sure there are tons of others in ioctl code, as various ioctl implementations have been found to be massive stack hogs in the past, even worse for out of tree drivers.

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#91 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

In reply to KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Quoted 6 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

yes. It's only called from
- page fault
- add_to_page_cache()

I think we'll see no stack problem. Now, memcg doesn't wakeup kswapd for reclaiming memory, it needs direct writeback.

The page fault code should be fine, but add_to_page_cache can be called with quite deep stacks. Two examples are grab_cache_page_write_begin which already was part of one of the stack overflows mentioned in this thread, or find_or_create_page which can be called via _xfs_buf_lookup_pages, which can be called from under the whole XFS allocator, or via grow_dev_page which might have a similarly deep stack for users of the normal buffer cache. Although for the find_or_create_page we usually should not have __GFP_FS set in the gfp_mask.

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#92 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 8 lines · On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:06:40 -0400 Christoph Hellwig <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 6 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

yes. It's only called from
- page fault
- add_to_page_cache()

I think we'll see no stack problem. Now, memcg doesn't wakeup kswapd for reclaiming memory, it needs direct writeback.

Quoted 10 lines

The page fault code should be fine, but add_to_page_cache can be called with quite deep stacks. Two examples are grab_cache_page_write_begin which already was part of one of the stack overflows mentioned in this thread, or find_or_create_page which can be called via _xfs_buf_lookup_pages, which can be called from under the whole XFS allocator, or via grow_dev_page which might have a similarly deep stack for users of the normal buffer cache. Although for the find_or_create_page we usually should not have __GFP_FS set in the gfp_mask.

Hmm. ok, then, memory cgroup needs some care.

BTW, why xbf_buf_create() use GFP_KERNEL even if it can be blocked ? memory cgroup just limits pages for users, then, doesn't intend to limit kernel pages. If this buffer is not for user(visible page cache), but for internal structure, I'll have to add a code for ignoreing memory cgroup check when gfp_mask doesn't have GFP_MOVABLE.

Thanks,
-Kame

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#93 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 4 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

BTW, why xbf_buf_create() use GFP_KERNEL even if it can be blocked ? memory cgroup just limits pages for users, then, doesn't intend to limit kernel pages.

You mean xfs_buf_allocate? It doesn't in the end. It goes through the xfs_kmem helper which clear __GFP_FS if we're currently inside a filesystem transaction (PF_FSTRANS is set) or a caller specificly requested it to be disabled even without that by passig the XBF_DONT_BLOCK flag.

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#94 lore raw

Re: [PATCH 12/12] vmscan: Do not writeback pages in direct reclaim

Quoted 6 lines · On Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:16:47 -0400 Christoph Hellwig <[email protected]> wrote:
Quoted 4 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki

BTW, why xbf_buf_create() use GFP_KERNEL even if it can be blocked ? memory cgroup just limits pages for users, then, doesn't intend to limit kernel pages.

Quoted 6 lines

You mean xfs_buf_allocate? It doesn't in the end. It goes through the xfs_kmem helper which clear __GFP_FS if we're currently inside a filesystem transaction (PF_FSTRANS is set) or a caller specificly requested it to be disabled even without that by passig the XBF_DONT_BLOCK flag.

Ah, sorry. My question was wrong.

If xfs_buf_allocate() is not for pages on LRU but for kernel memory, memory cgroup has no reason to charge against it because we can't reclaim memory which is not on LRU.

Then, I wonder I may have to add following check

	if (!(gfp_mask & __GFP_RECLAIMABLE)) {
		/* ignore this. we just charge against reclaimable memory on LRU. */
		return 0;
	}

to mem_cgroup_charge_cache() which is a hook for accounting page-cache.

Thanks,
-Kame

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#95 lore raw
In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 3 lines · Mel Gorman

This is a merging of two series - the first of which reduces stack usage in page reclaim and the second which writes contiguous pages during reclaim and avoids writeback in direct reclaimers.

This stuff looks good to me from the filesystem POV.

You might want to throw in a follow on patch to remove the PF_MEMALLOC checks from the various ->writepage methods.

author
#96 lore raw
Quoted 10 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 3 lines · Mel Gorman

This is a merging of two series - the first of which reduces stack usage in page reclaim and the second which writes contiguous pages during reclaim and avoids writeback in direct reclaimers.

This stuff looks good to me from the filesystem POV.

You might want to throw in a follow on patch to remove the PF_MEMALLOC checks from the various ->writepage methods.

Will do, thanks.

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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#97 lore raw
In reply to Mel Gorman
Quoted 11 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:41 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

SysBench
========

                traceonly-v2r5  stackreduce-v2r5     nodirect-v2r5
           1 11025.01 ( 0.00%) 10249.52 (-7.57%) 10430.57 (-5.70%)
           2  3844.63 ( 0.00%)  4988.95 (22.94%)  4038.95 ( 4.81%)
           3  3210.23 ( 0.00%)  2918.52 (-9.99%)  3113.38 (-3.11%)
           4  1958.91 ( 0.00%)  1987.69 ( 1.45%)  1808.37 (-8.32%)
           5  2864.92 ( 0.00%)  3126.13 ( 8.36%)  2355.70 (-21.62%)
           6  4831.63 ( 0.00%)  3815.67 (-26.63%)  4164.09 (-16.03%)
           7  3788.37 ( 0.00%)  3140.39 (-20.63%)  3471.36 (-9.13%)
           8  2293.61 ( 0.00%)  1636.87 (-40.12%)  1754.25 (-30.75%)
Quoted 6 lines

FTrace Reclaim Statistics
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims 9843 13398 51651
Direct reclaim pages scanned 871367 1008709 3080593
Direct reclaim write async I/O 24883 30699 0
Direct reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0

Hmm, page-scan and reclaims jumps up but...

Quoted 5 lines

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 734.52 712.39 703.9
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 9710.02 9589.20 9334.45
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.06% 0.00% 0.00%

Execution time is reduced. Does this shows removing "I/O noise" by direct reclaim makes the system happy ? or writeback in direct reclaim give us too much costs ?

It seems I'll have to consider about avoiding direct-reciam in memcg, later.

BTW, I think we'll have to add wait-for-pages-to-be-cleaned trick in direct reclaim if we want to avoid too much scanning, later.

Thank you for interesting test.

Regards,
-Kame

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author
#98 lore raw
Quoted 21 lines · KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Quoted 11 lines · On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:17:41 +0100 Mel Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:

SysBench
========

                traceonly-v2r5  stackreduce-v2r5     nodirect-v2r5
           1 11025.01 ( 0.00%) 10249.52 (-7.57%) 10430.57 (-5.70%)
           2  3844.63 ( 0.00%)  4988.95 (22.94%)  4038.95 ( 4.81%)
           3  3210.23 ( 0.00%)  2918.52 (-9.99%)  3113.38 (-3.11%)
           4  1958.91 ( 0.00%)  1987.69 ( 1.45%)  1808.37 (-8.32%)
           5  2864.92 ( 0.00%)  3126.13 ( 8.36%)  2355.70 (-21.62%)
           6  4831.63 ( 0.00%)  3815.67 (-26.63%)  4164.09 (-16.03%)
           7  3788.37 ( 0.00%)  3140.39 (-20.63%)  3471.36 (-9.13%)
           8  2293.61 ( 0.00%)  1636.87 (-40.12%)  1754.25 (-30.75%)
Quoted 6 lines

FTrace Reclaim Statistics
traceonly-v2r5 stackreduce-v2r5 nodirect-v2r5
Direct reclaims 9843 13398 51651
Direct reclaim pages scanned 871367 1008709 3080593
Direct reclaim write async I/O 24883 30699 0
Direct reclaim write sync I/O 0 0 0

Quoted 2 lines

Hmm, page-scan and reclaims jumps up but...

It could be accounted for by the fact that the direct reclaimers are stalled less in direct reclaim. They make more forward progress needing more pages so end up scanning more as a result.

Quoted 11 lines
Quoted 6 lines

User/Sys Time Running Test (seconds) 734.52 712.39 703.9
Percentage Time Spent Direct Reclaim 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
Total Elapsed Time (seconds) 9710.02 9589.20 9334.45
Percentage Time kswapd Awake 0.06% 0.00% 0.00%

Execution time is reduced. Does this shows removing "I/O noise" by direct reclaim makes the system happy? or writeback in direct reclaim give us too much costs ?

I think it's accounted for by just making more forward progress rather than IO noise. The throughput results for sysbench are all over the place because the disk was maxed so I'm shying away from drawing any conclusions on the IO efficiency.

Quoted 5 lines

It seems I'll have to consider about avoiding direct-reciam in memcg, later.

BTW, I think we'll have to add wait-for-pages-to-be-cleaned trick in direct reclaim if we want to avoid too much scanning, later.

This happens for lumpy reclaim. I didn't think it was justified for normal reclaim based on the percentage of dirty pages encountered during scanning. If the percentage of dirty pages scanned, we'll need to first figure out why that happened and then if stalling when they are encountered is the correct thing to do.

Quoted 3 lines

Thank you for interesting test.

You're welcome.

Signature · 9 lines
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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