There is an issue currently where NUMA information is used on powerpc
(and possibly ia64) before it has been read from the device-tree, which
leads to large slab consumption with CONFIG_SLUB and memoryless nodes.
NUMA powerpc non-boot CPU's cpu_to_node/cpu_to_mem is only accurate
after start_secondary(), similar to ia64, which is invoked via
smp_init().
Commit 6ee0578b4d ("workqueue: mark init_workqueues() as
early_initcall()") made init_workqueues() be invoked via
do_pre_smp_initcalls(), which is obviously before the secondary
processors are online.
Additionally, the following commits changed init_workqueues() to use
cpu_to_node to determine the node to use for kthread_create_on_node:
bce903809a ("workqueue: add wq_numa_tbl_len and
wq_numa_possible_cpumask[]")
f3f90ad469 ("workqueue: determine NUMA node of workers accourding to
the allowed cpumask")
Therefore, when init_workqueues() runs, it sees all CPUs as being on
Node 0. On LPARs or KVM guests where Node 0 is memoryless, this leads to
a high number of slab deactivations
(http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg67489.html).
Fix this by initializing the powerpc-specific CPU<->node/local memory
node mapping as early as possible, which on powerpc is
do_init_bootmem(). Currently that function initializes the mapping for
the boot CPU, but we extend it to setup the mapping for all possible
CPUs. Then, in smp_prepare_cpus(), we can correspondingly set the
per-cpu values for all possible CPUs. That ensures that before the
early_initcalls run (and really as early as possible), the per-cpu NUMA
mapping is accurate.
While testing memoryless nodes on PowerKVM guests with a fix to the
workqueue logic to use cpu_to_mem() instead of cpu_to_node(), with a
guest topology of:
available: 2 nodes (0-1)
node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
node 0 size: 0 MB
node 0 free: 0 MB
node 1 cpus: 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99
node 1 size: 16336 MB
node 1 free: 15329 MB
node distances:
node 0 1
0: 10 40
1: 40 10
the slab consumption decreases from
Slab: 932416 kB
SUnreclaim: 902336 kB
to
Slab: 395264 kB
SUnreclaim: 359424 kB
And we a corresponding increase in the slab efficiency from
slab mem objs slabs
used active active
------------------------------------------------------------
kmalloc-16384 337 MB 11.28% 100.00%
task_struct 288 MB 9.93% 100.00%
to
slab mem objs slabs
used active active
------------------------------------------------------------
kmalloc-16384 37 MB 100.00% 100.00%
task_struct 31 MB 100.00% 100.00%
Powerpc didn't support memoryless nodes until recently (64bb80d87f
"powerpc/numa: Enable CONFIG_HAVE_MEMORYLESS_NODES" and 8c27226119
"powerpc/numa: Enable USE_PERCPU_NUMA_NODE_ID"). Those commits also
helped improve memory consumption with these kind of environments.
Signed-off-by: Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
2fabf084b6