Re: [PATCH 09/22] mm: page allocator: Allocate/free order-0 pages from a per-zone magazine

[Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>]

On Thu, 9 May 2013, Mel Gorman wrote:

> >
> > The per cpu structure access also would not need to disable irq if the
> > fast path would be using this_cpu ops.
> >
>
> How does this_cpu protect against preemption due to interrupt?  this_read()
> itself only disables preemption and it's explicitly documented that
> interrupt that modifies the per-cpu data will not be reliable so the use
> of the per-cpu lists is right out. It would require that a race-prone
> check be used with cmpxchg which in turn would require arrays, not lists.

this_cpu uses single atomic instructions that cannot be interrupted. The
relocation occurs through a segment prefix and therefore is not subject
to preemption. The interrupts and rescheduling can occur between this_cpu
ops and there races would have to be dealt with. True using cmpxchg (w/o
lock semantics) is not that easy. But that is the fastest solution that I
know of.

> I don't see how as the page allocator does not control the physical location
> of any pages freed to it and it's the struct pages it is linking together. On
> some systems at least with 1G pages, the struct pages will be backed by
> memory mapped with 1G entries so the TLB pressure should be reduced but
> the cache pressure from struct page modifications is certainly a problem.

I would be useful if the allocator would hand out pages from the
same physical area first. This would reduce fragmentation as well and
since it is likely that numerous pages are allocated for some purpose
(given that that the page sizes of 4k are rather tiny compared to the data
needs these day) would reduce TLB pressure.

> > > > 3. The magazine_lock is potentially hot but it can be split to have
> > >    one lock per CPU socket to reduce contention. Draining the lists
> > >    in this case would acquire multiple locks be acquired.
> >
> > IMHO the use of per cpu RMV operations would be lower latency than the use
> > of spinlocks. There is no "lock" prefix overhead with those. Page
> > allocation is a frequent operation that I would think needs to be as fast
> > as possible.
>
> The memory requirements may be large because those per-cpu areas sized are
> allocated depending on num_possible_cpus()s. Correct? Regardless of their

Yes. But we have lots of memory in machines these days. Why would that be
an issue?

> size, it would still be required to deal with cpu hot-plug to avoid memory
> leaks and draining them would still require global IPIs so the overall
> code complexity would be similar to what exists today. Ultimately all that
> changes is that we use an array+cmpxchg instead of a list which will shave
> a small amount of latency but it will still be regularly falling back to
> the buddy lists and contend on the zone->lock due the limited size of the
> per-cpu magazines and hiding the advantage of using cmpxchg in the noise.

The latency would be an order of magnitude less than the approach that you
propose here. The magazine approach and the lockless approach both will
require slowpaths that replenish the set of pages to be served next.

The problem with the page allocator is that it can serve various types of
pages. If one wants to setup caches for all of those then these caches are
replicated for each processor or whatever higher unit we decide to use. I
think one of the first moves need to be to identify which types of pages
are actually useful to serve in a fast way. Higher order pages are already
out but what about the different zone types, migration types etc?

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