If large amounts of zone memory are used by empty slabs then zone_reclaim
becomes uneffective. This patch shakes the slab a bit.
The problem with this patch is that the slab reclaim is not containable to a
zone. Thus slab reclaim may affect the whole system and be extremely slow.
This also means that we cannot determine how many pages were freed in this
zone. Thus we need to go off node for at least one allocation.
The functionality is disabled by default.
We could modify the shrinkers to take a zone parameter but that would be quite
invasive. Better ideas are welcome.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
In some situations one may want zone_reclaim to behave differently. For
example a process writing large amounts of memory will spew unto other nodes
to cache the writes if many pages in a zone become dirty. This may impact the
performance of processes running on other nodes.
Allowing writes during reclaim puts a stop to that behavior and throttles the
process by restricting the pages to the local zone.
Similarly one may want to contain processes to local memory by enabling
regular swap behavior during zone_reclaim. Off node memory allocation can
then be controlled through memory policies and cpusets.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Currently the zone_reclaim code has a fixed window of 30 seconds of off node
allocations should a local zone have no unused pagecache pages left. Reclaim
will be attempted again after this timeout period to avoid repeated useless
scans for memory. This is also useful to established sufficiently large off
node allocation chunks to relieve the local node.
It may be beneficial to adjust that time period for some special situations.
For example if memory use was exceeding node capacity one may want to give up
for longer periods of time. If memory spikes intermittendly then one may want
to shorten the time period to reduce the number of off node allocations.
This patch allows just that....
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
proc support for zone reclaim
This patch creates a proc entry /proc/sys/vm/zone_reclaim_mode that may be
used to override the automatic determination of the zone reclaim made on
bootup.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
As recently there has been lot of traffic on the right values for batch and
high water marks for per_cpu_pagelists. This patch makes these two
variables configurable through /proc interface.
A new tunable /proc/sys/vm/percpu_pagelist_fraction is added. This entry
controls the fraction of pages at most in each zone that are allocated for
each per cpu page list. The min value for this is 8. It means that we
don't allow more than 1/8th of pages in each zone to be allocated in any
single per_cpu_pagelist.
The batch value of each per cpu pagelist is also updated as a result. It
is set to pcp->high/4. The upper limit of batch is (PAGE_SHIFT * 8)
Signed-off-by: Rohit Seth <rohit.seth@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Add /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. When written to, this will cause the kernel to
discard as much pagecache and/or reclaimable slab objects as it can. THis
operation requires root permissions.
It won't drop dirty data, so the user should run `sync' first.
Caveats:
a) Holds inode_lock for exorbitant amounts of time.
b) Needs to be taught about NUMA nodes: propagate these all the way through
so the discarding can be controlled on a per-node basis.
This is a debugging feature: useful for getting consistent results between
filesystem benchmarks. We could possibly put it under a config option, but
it's less than 300 bytes.
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!
