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  1. 16 Oct, 2007 2 commits
    • Nick Piggin's avatar
      remove ZERO_PAGE · 557ed1fa
      Nick Piggin authored 
      The commit b5810039

 contains the note

  A last caveat: the ZERO_PAGE is now refcounted and managed with rmap
  (and thus mapcounted and count towards shared rss).  These writes to
  the struct page could cause excessive cacheline bouncing on big
  systems.  There are a number of ways this could be addressed if it is
  an issue.

And indeed this cacheline bouncing has shown up on large SGI systems.
There was a situation where an Altix system was essentially livelocked
tearing down ZERO_PAGE pagetables when an HPC app aborted during startup.
This situation can be avoided in userspace, but it does highlight the
potential scalability problem with refcounting ZERO_PAGE, and corner
cases where it can really hurt (we don't want the system to livelock!).

There are several broad ways to fix this problem:
1. add back some special casing to avoid refcounting ZERO_PAGE
2. per-node or per-cpu ZERO_PAGES
3. remove the ZERO_PAGE completely

I will argue for 3. The others should also fix the problem, but they
result in more complex code than does 3, with little or no real benefit
that I can see.

Why? Inserting a ZERO_PAGE for anonymous read faults appears to be a
false optimisation: if an application is performance critical, it would
not be doing many read faults of new memory, or at least it could be
expected to write to that memory soon afterwards. If cache or memory use
is critical, it should not be working with a significant number of
ZERO_PAGEs anyway (a more compact representation of zeroes should be
used).

As a sanity check -- mesuring on my desktop system, there are never many
mappings to the ZERO_PAGE (eg. 2 or 3), thus memory usage here should not
increase much without it.

When running a make -j4 kernel compile on my dual core system, there are
about 1,000 mappings to the ZERO_PAGE created per second, but about 1,000
ZERO_PAGE COW faults per second (less than 1 ZERO_PAGE mapping per second
is torn down without being COWed). So removing ZERO_PAGE will save 1,000
page faults per second when running kbuild, while keeping it only saves
less than 1 page clearing operation per second. 1 page clear is cheaper
than a thousand faults, presumably, so there isn't an obvious loss.

Neither the logical argument nor these basic tests give a guarantee of no
regressions. However, this is a reasonable opportunity to try to remove
the ZERO_PAGE from the pagefault path. If it is found to cause regressions,
we can reintroduce it and just avoid refcounting it.

The /dev/zero ZERO_PAGE usage and TLB tricks also get nuked.  I don't see
much use to them except on benchmarks.  All other users of ZERO_PAGE are
converted just to use ZERO_PAGE(0) for simplicity. We can look at
replacing them all and maybe ripping out ZERO_PAGE completely when we are
more satisfied with this solution.
Signed-off-by: default avatarNick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus "snif" Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      557ed1fa
    • Fengguang Wu's avatar
      readahead: combine file_ra_state.prev_index/prev_offset into prev_pos · f4e6b498
      Fengguang Wu authored 
      
Combine the file_ra_state members
				unsigned long prev_index
				unsigned int prev_offset
into
				loff_t prev_pos

It is more consistent and better supports huge files.

Thanks to Peter for the nice proposal!

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix shift overflow]
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarFengguang Wu <wfg@mail.ustc.edu.cn>
Cc: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
      f4e6b498
  3. 15 Oct, 2007 6 commits
  5. 14 Oct, 2007 2 commits
  7. 13 Oct, 2007 1 commit
    • Peter Zijlstra's avatar
      lockdep: annotate dir vs file i_mutex · 14358e6d
      Peter Zijlstra authored 
      
On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 22:13 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> The circular lock seems to be this:
> 
> #1:
> 
>   sys_mmap2:              down_write(&mm->mmap_sem);
>   nfs_revalidate_mapping: mutex_lock(&inode->i_mutex);
> 
> 
> #0:
> 
>   vfs_readdir:     mutex_lock(&inode->i_mutex);
>    - during the readdir (filldir64), we take a user fault (missing page?)
>     and call do_page_fault -
>   do_page_fault:   down_read(&mm->mmap_sem);
> 
> 
> So it does indeed look like a circular locking. Now the question is, "is
> this a bug?".  Looking like the inode of #1 must be a file or something
> else that you can mmap and the inode of #0 seems it must be a directory.
> I would say "no".
> 
> Now if you can readdir on a file or mmap a directory, then this could be
> an issue.
> 
> Otherwise, I'd love to see someone teach lockdep about this issue! ;-)

Make a distinction between file and dir usage of i_mutex.
The inode should be complete and unused at unlock_new_inode(), re-init
i_mutex depending on its type.
Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
      14358e6d
  9. 15 Oct, 2007 1 commit
  11. 13 Oct, 2007 7 commits
  13. 12 Oct, 2007 21 commits