This removes sys_set_zone_reclaim() for now. While i'm sure Martin is
trying to solve a real problem, we must not hard-code an incomplete and
insufficient approach into a syscall, because syscalls are pretty much
for eternity. I am quite strongly convinced that this syscall must not
hit v2.6.13 in its current form.
Firstly, the syscall lacks basic syscall design: e.g. it allows the
global setting of VM policy for unprivileged users. (!) [ Imagine an
Oracle installation and a SAP installation on the same NUMA box fighting
over the 'optimal' setting for this flag. What will they do? Will they
try to set the flag to their own preferred value every second or so? ]
Secondly, it was added based on a single datapoint from Martin:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-mm&m=111763597218177&w=2
where Martin characterizes the numbers the following way:
' Run-to-run variability for "make -j" is huge, so these numbers aren't
terribly useful except to see that with reclaim the benchmark still
finishes in a reasonable amount of time. '
in other words: the fundamental problem has likely not been solved, only
a tendential move into the right direction has been observed, and a
handful of numbers were picked out of a set of hugely variable results,
without showing the variability data. How much variance is there
run-to-run?
I'd really suggest to first walk the walk and see what's needed to get
stable & predictable kernel compilation numbers on that NUMA box, before
adding random syscalls to tune a particular aspect of the VM ... which
approach might not even matter once the whole picture has been analyzed
and understood!
The third, most important point is that the syscall exposes VM tuning
internals in a completely unstructured way. What sense does it make to
have a _GLOBAL_ per-node setting for 'should we go to another node for
reclaim'? If then it might make sense to do this per-app, via numalib or
so.
The change is minimalistic in that it doesnt remove the syscall and the
underlying infrastructure changes, only the user-visible changes. We
could perhaps add a CAP_SYS_ADMIN-only sysctl for this hack, a'ka
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but even that looks quite counterproductive
when the generic approach is that we are trying to reduce the number of
external factors in the VM balance picture.
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly
its inability to scale and its terrible user interface:
* dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory
that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many
open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount.
* dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects
the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of
stat structures.
* dnotify's interface to user-space is awful. Signals?
inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:
* inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO.
You get a single fd, which is select()-able.
* inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item
you were watching is on was unmounted."
* inotify can watch directories or files.
Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure),
Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects.
See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt.
Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch introduces the architecture independent implementation the
sys_kexec_load, the compat_sys_kexec_load system calls.
Kexec on panic support has been integrated into the core patch and is
relatively clean.
In addition the hopefully architecture independent option
crashkernel=size@location has been docuemented. It's purpose is to reserve
space for the panic kernel to live, and where no DMA transfer will ever be
setup to access.
Signed-off-by: Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexander Nyberg <alexn@telia.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Signed-off-by: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This is the core of the (much simplified) early reclaim. The goal of this
patch is to reclaim some easily-freed pages from a zone before falling back
onto another zone.
One of the major uses of this is NUMA machines. With the default allocator
behavior the allocator would look for memory in another zone, which might be
off-node, before trying to reclaim from the current zone.
This adds a zone tuneable to enable early zone reclaim. It is selected on a
per-zone basis and is turned on/off via syscall.
Adding some extra throttling on the reclaim was also required (patch
4/4). Without the machine would grind to a crawl when doing a "make -j"
kernel build. Even with this patch the System Time is higher on
average, but it seems tolerable. Here are some numbers for kernbench
runs on a 2-node, 4cpu, 8Gig RAM Altix in the "make -j" run:
wall user sys %cpu ctx sw. sleeps
---- ---- --- ---- ------ ------
No patch 1009 1384 847 258 298170 504402
w/patch, no reclaim 880 1376 667 288 254064 396745
w/patch & reclaim 1079 1385 926 252 291625 548873
These numbers are the average of 2 runs of 3 "make -j" runs done right
after system boot. Run-to-run variability for "make -j" is huge, so
these numbers aren't terribly useful except to seee that with reclaim
the benchmark still finishes in a reasonable amount of time.
I also looked at the NUMA hit/miss stats for the "make -j" runs and the
reclaim doesn't make any difference when the machine is thrashing away.
Doing a "make -j8" on a single node that is filled with page cache pages
takes 700 seconds with reclaim turned on and 735 seconds without reclaim
(due to remote memory accesses).
The simple zone_reclaim syscall program is at
http://www.bork.org/~mort/sgi/zone_reclaim.c
Signed-off-by: Martin Hicks <mort@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Ingo Molnar
Robert Love
Eric W. Biederman
Martin Hicks
Stephen Rothwell
Linus Torvalds