linux/arch/i386
Martin Hicks 753ee72896 [PATCH] VM: early zone reclaim
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>
2005-06-21 18:46:14 -07:00
..
boot [PATCH] CodingStyle: trivial whitespace fixups 2005-05-05 16:36:49 -07:00
crypto Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
kernel [PATCH] VM: early zone reclaim 2005-06-21 18:46:14 -07:00
lib [PATCH] smp_processor_id() cleanup 2005-06-21 18:46:13 -07:00
mach-default Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
mach-es7000 Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
mach-generic Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
mach-visws Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
mach-voyager [PATCH] voyager_smp.c static inline fix 2005-05-24 20:08:12 -07:00
math-emu Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
mm [PATCH] i386: Fix race in iounmap 2005-05-20 15:48:20 -07:00
oprofile [PATCH] Change synchronize_kernel to _rcu and _sched 2005-05-01 08:59:04 -07:00
pci [PATCH] VIA IRQ quirk 2005-05-27 08:15:04 -07:00
power Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
defconfig Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
Kconfig [PATCH] Note on ACPI build fix 2005-05-27 08:15:05 -07:00
Kconfig.debug Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
Makefile [PATCH] x86: geode support fixes 2005-05-05 16:36:49 -07:00