user/sven/linux.git/include/linux/gfp.h, branch v3.3.5

mm: try to distribute dirty pages fairly across zones

2012-01-11T00:30:43Z

The maximum number of dirty pages that exist in the system at any time is determined by a number of pages considered dirtyable and a user-configured percentage of those, or an absolute number in bytes. This number of dirtyable pages is the sum of memory provided by all the zones in the system minus their lowmem reserves and high watermarks, so that the system can retain a healthy number of free pages without having to reclaim dirty pages. But there is a flaw in that we have a zoned page allocator which does not care about the global state but rather the state of individual memory zones. And right now there is nothing that prevents one zone from filling up with dirty pages while other zones are spared, which frequently leads to situations where kswapd, in order to restore the watermark of free pages, does indeed have to write pages from that zone's LRU list. This can interfere so badly with IO from the flusher threads that major filesystems (btrfs, xfs, ext4) mostly ignore write requests from reclaim already, taking away the VM's only possibility to keep such a zone balanced, aside from hoping the flushers will soon clean pages from that zone. Enter per-zone dirty limits. They are to a zone's dirtyable memory what the global limit is to the global amount of dirtyable memory, and try to make sure that no single zone receives more than its fair share of the globally allowed dirty pages in the first place. As the number of pages considered dirtyable excludes the zones' lowmem reserves and high watermarks, the maximum number of dirty pages in a zone is such that the zone can always be balanced without requiring page cleaning. As this is a placement decision in the page allocator and pages are dirtied only after the allocation, this patch allows allocators to pass __GFP_WRITE when they know in advance that the page will be written to and become dirty soon. The page allocator will then attempt to allocate from the first zone of the zonelist - which on NUMA is determined by the task's NUMA memory policy - that has not exceeded its dirty limit. At first glance, it would appear that the diversion to lower zones can increase pressure on them, but this is not the case. With a full high zone, allocations will be diverted to lower zones eventually, so it is more of a shift in timing of the lower zone allocations. Workloads that previously could fit their dirty pages completely in the higher zone may be forced to allocate from lower zones, but the amount of pages that "spill over" are limited themselves by the lower zones' dirty constraints, and thus unlikely to become a problem. For now, the problem of unfair dirty page distribution remains for NUMA configurations where the zones allowed for allocation are in sum not big enough to trigger the global dirty limits, wake up the flusher threads and remedy the situation. Because of this, an allocation that could not succeed on any of the considered zones is allowed to ignore the dirty limits before going into direct reclaim or even failing the allocation, until a future patch changes the global dirty throttling and flusher thread activation so that they take individual zone states into account. Test results 15M DMA + 3246M DMA32 + 504 Normal = 3765M memory 40% dirty ratio 16G USB thumb drive 10 runs of dd if=/dev/zero of=disk/zeroes bs=32k count=$((10 << 15)) seconds nr_vmscan_write (stddev) min| median| max xfs vanilla: 549.747( 3.492) 0.000| 0.000| 0.000 patched: 550.996( 3.802) 0.000| 0.000| 0.000 fuse-ntfs vanilla: 1183.094(53.178) 54349.000| 59341.000| 65163.000 patched: 558.049(17.914) 0.000| 0.000| 43.000 btrfs vanilla: 573.679(14.015) 156657.000| 460178.000| 606926.000 patched: 563.365(11.368) 0.000| 0.000| 1362.000 ext4 vanilla: 561.197(15.782) 0.000|2725438.000|4143837.000 patched: 568.806(17.496) 0.000| 0.000| 0.000 Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Acked-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko Tested-by: Wu Fengguang Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Christoph Hellwig Cc: Dave Chinner Cc: Jan Kara Cc: Shaohua Li Cc: Rik van Riel Cc: Chris Mason Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, debug: test for online nid when allocating on single node

2012-01-11T00:30:43Z

Calling alloc_pages_exact_node() means the allocation only passes the zonelist of a single node into the page allocator. If that node isn't online, it's zonelist may never have been initialized causing a strange oops that may not immediately be clear. I recently debugged an issue where node 0 wasn't online and an allocator was passing 0 to alloc_pages_exact_node() and it resulted in a NULL pointer on zonelist->_zoneref. If CONFIG_DEBUG_VM is enabled, though, it would be nice to catch this a bit earlier. Signed-off-by: David Rientjes Acked-by: Mel Gorman Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: avoid livelock on !__GFP_FS allocations

2012-01-11T00:30:42Z

Colin Cross reported; Under the following conditions, __alloc_pages_slowpath can loop forever: gfp_mask & __GFP_WAIT is true gfp_mask & __GFP_FS is false reclaim and compaction make no progress order <= PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER These conditions happen very often during suspend and resume, when pm_restrict_gfp_mask() effectively converts all GFP_KERNEL allocations into __GFP_WAIT. The oom killer is not run because gfp_mask & __GFP_FS is false, but should_alloc_retry will always return true when order is less than PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER. In his fix, he avoided retrying the allocation if reclaim made no progress and __GFP_FS was not set. The problem is that this would result in GFP_NOIO allocations failing that previously succeeded which would be very unfortunate. The big difference between GFP_NOIO and suspend converting GFP_KERNEL to behave like GFP_NOIO is that normally flushers will be cleaning pages and kswapd reclaims pages allowing GFP_NOIO to succeed after a short delay. The same does not necessarily apply during suspend as the storage device may be suspended. This patch special cases the suspend case to fail the page allocation if reclaim cannot make progress and adds some documentation on how gfp_allowed_mask is currently used. Failing allocations like this may cause suspend to abort but that is better than a livelock. [mgorman@suse.de: Rework fix to be suspend specific] [rientjes@google.com: Move suspended device check to should_alloc_retry] Reported-by: Colin Cross Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Acked-by: David Rientjes Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: Pekka Enberg Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Andrea Arcangeli Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: add free_hot_cold_page_list() helper

2012-01-11T00:30:41Z

This patch adds helper free_hot_cold_page_list() to free list of 0-order pages. It frees pages directly from list without temporary page-vector. It also calls trace_mm_pagevec_free() to simulate pagevec_free() behaviour. bloat-o-meter: add/remove: 1/1 grow/shrink: 1/3 up/down: 267/-295 (-28) function old new delta free_hot_cold_page_list - 264 +264 get_page_from_freelist 2129 2132 +3 __pagevec_free 243 239 -4 split_free_page 380 373 -7 release_pages 606 510 -96 free_page_list 188 - -188 Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro Acked-by: Minchan Kim Acked-by: Hugh Dickins Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: page_alloc: increase __GFP_BITS_SHIFT to include __GFP_OTHER_NODE

2011-08-04T00:25:21Z

__GFP_OTHER_NODE is used for NUMA allocations on behalf of other nodes. It's supposed to be passed through from the page allocator to zone_statistics(), but it never gets there as gfp_allowed_mask is not wide enough and masks out the flag early in the allocation path. The result is an accounting glitch where successful NUMA allocations by-agent are not properly attributed as local. Increase __GFP_BITS_SHIFT so that it includes __GFP_OTHER_NODE. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Acked-by: Andi Kleen Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim Acked-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

include/linux/gfp.h: convert BUG_ON() into VM_BUG_ON()

2011-05-25T15:39:11Z

VM_BUG_ON() if effectively a BUG_ON() undef #ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_VM. That is exactly what we have here now, and two different folks have suggested doing it this way. Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen Cc: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

include/linux/gfp.h: work around apparent sparse confusion

2011-05-25T15:39:11Z

Running sparse on page_alloc.c today, it errors out: include/linux/gfp.h:254:17: error: bad constant expression include/linux/gfp.h:254:17: error: cannot size expression which is a line in gfp_zone(): BUILD_BUG_ON((GFP_ZONE_BAD >> bit) & 1); That's really unfortunate, because it ends up hiding all of the other legitimate sparse messages like this: mm/page_alloc.c:5315:59: warning: incorrect type in argument 1 (different base types) mm/page_alloc.c:5315:59: expected unsigned long [unsigned] [usertype] size mm/page_alloc.c:5315:59: got restricted gfp_t [usertype] ... Having sparse be able to catch these very oopsable bugs is a lot more important than keeping a BUILD_BUG_ON(). Kill the BUILD_BUG_ON(). Compiles on x86_64 with and without CONFIG_DEBUG_VM=y. defconfig boots fine for me. Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: add alloc_pages_exact_nid()

2011-05-12T01:50:45Z

Add a alloc_pages_exact_nid() that allocates on a specific node. The naming is quite broken, but fixing that would need a larger renaming action. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak comment] Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen Cc: Michal Hocko Cc: Balbir Singh Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro Cc: Dave Hansen Cc: David Rientjes Acked-by: Johannes Weiner Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: add __GFP_OTHER_NODE flag

2011-03-23T00:44:05Z

Add a new __GFP_OTHER_NODE flag to tell the low level numa statistics in zone_statistics() that an allocation is on behalf of another thread. This way the local and remote counters can be still correct, even when background daemons like khugepaged are changing memory mappings. This only affects the accounting, but I think it's worth doing that right to avoid confusing users. I first tried to just pass down the right node, but this required a lot of changes to pass down this parameter and at least one addition of a 10th argument to a 9 argument function. Using the flag is a lot less intrusive. Open: should be also used for migration? [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen Cc: Andrea Arcangeli Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Cc: Johannes Weiner Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: add alloc_page_vma_node()

2011-03-05T01:53:39Z

Add a alloc_page_vma_node that allows passing the "local" node in. Used in a followon patch. Acked-by: Andrea Arcangeli Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds