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Claudio Imbrenda e86c59b1b1 mm/ksm: improve deduplication of zero pages with colouring
Some architectures have a set of zero pages (coloured zero pages)
instead of only one zero page, in order to improve the cache
performance.  In those cases, the kernel samepage merger (KSM) would
merge all the allocated pages that happen to be filled with zeroes to
the same deduplicated page, thus losing all the advantages of coloured
zero pages.

This behaviour is noticeable when a process accesses large arrays of
allocated pages containing zeroes.  A test I conducted on s390 shows
that there is a speed penalty when KSM merges such pages, compared to
not merging them or using actual zero pages from the start without
breaking the COW.

This patch fixes this behaviour.  When coloured zero pages are present,
the checksum of a zero page is calculated during initialisation, and
compared with the checksum of the current canditate during merging.  In
case of a match, the normal merging routine is used to merge the page
with the correct coloured zero page, which ensures the candidate page is
checked to be equal to the target zero page.

A sysfs entry is also added to toggle this behaviour, since it can
potentially introduce performance regressions, especially on
architectures without coloured zero pages.  The default value is
disabled, for backwards compatibility.

With this patch, the performance with KSM is the same as with non
COW-broken actual zero pages, which is also the same as without KSM.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: make zero_checksum and ksm_use_zero_pages __read_mostly, per Andrea]
[imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com: documentation for coloured zero pages deduplication]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1484927522-1964-1-git-send-email-imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1484850953-23941-1-git-send-email-imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Signed-off-by: Claudio Imbrenda <imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2017-02-24 17:46:53 -08:00
arch cris: use generic current.h 2017-02-24 17:46:53 -08:00
block block: use for_each_thread() in sys_ioprio_set()/sys_ioprio_get() 2017-02-22 16:41:27 -08:00
certs certs: Add a secondary system keyring that can be added to dynamically 2016-04-11 22:48:09 +01:00
crypto crypto: xts - Add ECB dependency 2017-02-23 20:11:06 +08:00
Documentation mm/ksm: improve deduplication of zero pages with colouring 2017-02-24 17:46:53 -08:00
drivers Less anger inducing pull request for 4.11 2017-02-23 18:58:18 -08:00
firmware WHENCE: use https://linuxtv.org for LinuxTV URLs 2015-12-04 10:35:11 -02:00
fs Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace 2017-02-23 20:33:51 -08:00
include Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace 2017-02-23 20:33:51 -08:00
init Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew) 2017-02-22 19:29:24 -08:00
ipc ipc/sem.c: fix incorrect sem_lock pairing 2017-01-10 18:31:55 -08:00
kernel Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace 2017-02-23 20:33:51 -08:00
lib Less anger inducing pull request for 4.11 2017-02-23 18:58:18 -08:00
mm mm/ksm: improve deduplication of zero pages with colouring 2017-02-24 17:46:53 -08:00
net bpf: Fix bpf_xdp_event_output 2017-02-23 13:53:42 -05:00
samples Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-next 2017-02-22 10:15:09 -08:00
scripts Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew) 2017-02-22 19:29:24 -08:00
security Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace 2017-02-23 20:33:51 -08:00
sound Less anger inducing pull request for 4.11 2017-02-23 18:58:18 -08:00
tools Less anger inducing pull request for 4.11 2017-02-23 18:58:18 -08:00
usr kbuild: initramfs cleanup, set target from Kconfig 2017-01-05 09:40:16 -08:00
virt KVM: Return an error code only as a constant in kvm_get_dirty_log() 2017-02-17 12:30:14 +01:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore Add hch to .get_maintainer.ignore 2015-08-21 14:30:10 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set git diff driver for C source code files 2016-10-07 18:46:30 -07:00
.gitignore Merge branch 'misc' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mmarek/kbuild 2016-08-02 16:48:52 -04:00
.mailmap mailmap: add codeaurora.org names for nameless email commits 2017-01-10 18:31:55 -08:00
COPYING
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: Remove old e-mail address 2017-02-13 12:24:56 -05:00
Kbuild scripts/gdb: provide linux constants 2016-05-23 17:04:14 -07:00
Kconfig
MAINTAINERS Less anger inducing pull request for 4.11 2017-02-23 18:58:18 -08:00
Makefile A slightly quieter cycle for documentation this time around. 2017-02-22 18:51:29 -08:00
README README: add a new README file, pointing to the Documentation/ 2016-10-24 08:12:35 -02:00

Linux kernel
============

This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst

Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users.
These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.