Hi Mel,

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 04:44:26PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 11:51:43PM +0800, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 02:34:50PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
[snip]
> > > I doubt hackbench is doing any flushes and the 1.2% is noise.
> > 
> > Here are the proc-vmstat.nr_tlb_remote_flush numbers for hackbench:
> > 
> >        513 ~ 3%  +4.3e+16%  2.192e+17 ~85%  lkp-nex05/micro/hackbench/800%-process-pipe
> >        603 ~ 3%  +7.7e+16%  4.669e+17 ~13%  lkp-nex05/micro/hackbench/800%-process-socket
> >       6124 ~17%  +5.7e+15%  3.474e+17 ~26%  lkp-nex05/micro/hackbench/800%-threads-pipe
> >       7565 ~49%  +5.5e+15%  4.128e+17 ~68%  lkp-nex05/micro/hackbench/800%-threads-socket
> >      21252 ~ 6%  +1.3e+15%  2.728e+17 ~39%  lkp-snb01/micro/hackbench/1600%-threads-pipe
> >      24516 ~16%  +8.3e+14%  2.034e+17 ~53%  lkp-snb01/micro/hackbench/1600%-threads-socket
> > 
> 
> This is a surprise. The differences I can understand because of changes
> in accounting but not the flushes themselves. The only flushes I would
> expect are when the process exits and the regions are torn down.
> 
> The exception would be if automatic NUMA balancing was enabled and this
> was a NUMA machine. In that case, NUMA hinting faults could be migrating
> memory and triggering flushes.

You are right, the kconfig (attached) does have

CONFIG_NUMA_BALANCING=y

and lkp-nex05 is a 4-socket NHM-EX machine; lkp-snb01 is a 2-socket
SNB machine.

> Could you do something like
> 
> # perf probe native_flush_tlb_others
> # cd /sys/kernel/debug/tracing
> # echo sym-offset > trace_options
> # echo sym-addr > trace_options
> # echo stacktrace > trace_options
> # echo 1 > events/probe/native_flush_tlb_others/enable
> # cat trace_pipe > /tmp/log
> 
> and get a breakdown of what the source of these remote flushes are
> please?

Sure. Attached is the log file.

> > This time, the ebizzy params are refreshed and the test case is
> > exercised in all our test machines. The results that have changed are:
> > 
> >       v3.13-rc3       eabb1f89905a0c809d13  
> > ---------------  -------------------------  
> >        873 ~ 0%      +0.7%        879 ~ 0%  lkp-a03/micro/ebizzy/200%-100-10
> >        873 ~ 0%      +0.7%        879 ~ 0%  lkp-a04/micro/ebizzy/200%-100-10
> >        873 ~ 0%      +0.8%        880 ~ 0%  lkp-a06/micro/ebizzy/200%-100-10
> >      49242 ~ 0%      -1.2%      48650 ~ 0%  lkp-ib03/micro/ebizzy/200%-100-10
> >      26176 ~ 0%      -1.6%      25760 ~ 0%  lkp-sbx04/micro/ebizzy/200%-100-10
> >       2738 ~ 0%      +0.2%       2744 ~ 0%  lkp-t410/micro/ebizzy/200%-100-10
> >      80776           -1.2%      79793       TOTAL ebizzy.throughput
> > 
> 
> No change on lkp-ib03 which I would have expected some difference. Thing
> is, for ebizzy to notice the number of TLB entries matter. On both
> machines I tested, the last level TLB had 512 entries. How many entries
> are on the last level TLB on lkp-ib03?

[    0.116154] Last level iTLB entries: 4KB 512, 2MB 0, 4MB 0
[    0.116154] Last level dTLB entries: 4KB 512, 2MB 0, 4MB 0

> > > I do see a few major regressions like this
> > > 
> > > >     324497 ~ 0%    -100.0%          0 ~ 0%  brickland2/micro/vm-scalability/16G-truncate
> > > 
> > > but I have no idea what the test is doing and whether something happened
> > > that the test broke that time or if it's something to be really
> > > concerned about.
> > 
> > This test case simply creates sparse files, populate them with zeros,
> > then delete them in parallel. Here $mem is physical memory size 128G,
> > $nr_cpu is 120.
> > 
> > for i in `seq $nr_cpu`
> > do      
> >         create_sparse_file $SPARSE_FILE-$i $((mem / nr_cpu))
> >         cp $SPARSE_FILE-$i /dev/null
> > done
> > 
> > for i in `seq $nr_cpu`
> > do      
> >         rm $SPARSE_FILE-$i &
> > done
> > 
> 
> In itself, that does not explain why the result was 0 with the series
> applied. The 3.13-rc3 result was "324497". 324497 what?

It's the proc-vmstat.nr_tlb_local_flush_one number, which is showed in the end
of every "TOTAL" line:

      v3.13-rc3       eabb1f89905a0c809d13
---------------  -------------------------  
...
    324497 ~ 0%    -100.0%          0 ~ 0%  brickland2/micro/vm-scalability/16G-truncate
...
  99986527         +3e+14%  2.988e+20       TOTAL proc-vmstat.nr_tlb_local_flush_one
                                                  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

btw, I've got the full test results for hackbench. Attached are the
new comparison results. There are small ups and downs, overall no big
regressions.

Thanks,
Fengguang