11 May, 2007
1 commit
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Avoid atomic overhead in slab_alloc and slab_free
SLUB needs to use the slab_lock for the per cpu slabs to synchronize with
potential kfree operations. This patch avoids that need by moving all free
objects onto a lockless_freelist. The regular freelist continues to exist
and will be used to free objects. So while we consume the
lockless_freelist the regular freelist may build up objects.If we are out of objects on the lockless_freelist then we may check the
regular freelist. If it has objects then we move those over to the
lockless_freelist and do this again. There is a significant savings in
terms of atomic operations that have to be performed.We can even free directly to the lockless_freelist if we know that we are
running on the same processor. So this speeds up short lived objects.
They may be allocated and freed without taking the slab_lock. This is
particular good for netperf.In order to maximize the effect of the new faster hotpath we extract the
hottest performance pieces into inlined functions. These are then inlined
into kmem_cache_alloc and kmem_cache_free. So hotpath allocation and
freeing no longer requires a subroutine call within SLUB.[I am not sure that it is worth doing this because it changes the easy to
read structure of slub just to reduce atomic ops. However, there is
someone out there with a benchmark on 4 way and 8 way processor systems
that seems to show a 5% regression vs. Slab. Seems that the regression is
due to increased atomic operations use vs. SLAB in SLUB). I wonder if
this is applicable or discernable at all in a real workload?]Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds
08 May, 2007
1 commit
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This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the
existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns
with the existing implementation.A. Management of object queues
A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object
queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for
each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of
queueing them up.B. Storage overhead of object queues
SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even
has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each
node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of
objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our
systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up
for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include
the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole
memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues.C. SLAB meta data overhead
SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data
cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps
all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally
aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte
boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over.
SLAB cannot do this.D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper
SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems
the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that
operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list
of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues
during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs.E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support
SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that
allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that
situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of
policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is
certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to
memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from
one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects
from one node and then will switch to the next.F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists
SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large
number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can
only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global
pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to
decrease fragmentation.G. Tunables
SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can
manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still
requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global
parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab
order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the
less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the
better SLUB will be scaling.G. Slab merging
We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those
on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This
leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can
be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease
slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled
up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying
slub_nomerge on boot up.Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel
because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt
differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those.H. Diagnostics
The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a
recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that
is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths).
SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option.
Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of
slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running
with the usual performance and it is much more likely that
race conditions can be reproduced.I. Resiliency
If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting
common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the
system to continue.J. Tracing
Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T, option
during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache
and dump the object contents on free.K. On demand DMA cache creation.
Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with
__GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed.
For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is
completely eliminated.L. Performance increase
Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the
range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the
underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate
larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub
performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may
enable further performance increases.Tested on:
i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + SimulatorSLUB Boot options
slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs
slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This
increases the managed chunk size and therefore
reduces meta data and locking overhead.
slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8.
slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified.
slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches
slub_debug= Enable selective options for all caches
slub_debug=, Enable selective options for a certain set of
cachesAvailable Debug options
F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency
R Red zoning
P Object / padding poisoning
U Track last free / alloc
T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs).To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab
allocator.[hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds
27 Sep, 2006
1 commit
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This moves the definition of struct page from mm.h to its own header file
page-struct.h. This is a prereq to fix SetPageUptodate which is broken on
s390:#define SetPageUptodate(_page)
do {
struct page *__page = (_page);
if (!test_and_set_bit(PG_uptodate, &__page->flags))
page_test_and_clear_dirty(_page);
} while (0)_page gets used twice in this macro which can cause subtle bugs. Using
__page for the page_test_and_clear_dirty call doesn't work since it causes
yet another problem with the page_test_and_clear_dirty macro as well.In order to avoid all these problems caused by macros it seems to be a good
idea to get rid of them and convert them to static inline functions.
Because of header file include order it's necessary to have a seperate
header file for the struct page definition.Cc: Martin Schwidefsky
Signed-off-by: Heiko Carstens
Cc: Roman Zippel
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds
