09 Oct, 2013

2 commits

  • Change the per page last fault tracking to use cpu,pid instead of
    nid,pid. This will allow us to try and lookup the alternate task more
    easily. Note that even though it is the cpu that is store in the page
    flags that the mpol_misplaced decision is still based on the node.

    Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra
    Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman
    Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel
    Cc: Andrea Arcangeli
    Cc: Johannes Weiner
    Cc: Srikar Dronamraju
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1381141781-10992-43-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de
    [ Fixed build failure on 32-bit systems. ]
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Peter Zijlstra
     
  • Ideally it would be possible to distinguish between NUMA hinting faults that
    are private to a task and those that are shared. If treated identically
    there is a risk that shared pages bounce between nodes depending on
    the order they are referenced by tasks. Ultimately what is desirable is
    that task private pages remain local to the task while shared pages are
    interleaved between sharing tasks running on different nodes to give good
    average performance. This is further complicated by THP as even
    applications that partition their data may not be partitioning on a huge
    page boundary.

    To start with, this patch assumes that multi-threaded or multi-process
    applications partition their data and that in general the private accesses
    are more important for cpu->memory locality in the general case. Also,
    no new infrastructure is required to treat private pages properly but
    interleaving for shared pages requires additional infrastructure.

    To detect private accesses the pid of the last accessing task is required
    but the storage requirements are a high. This patch borrows heavily from
    Ingo Molnar's patch "numa, mm, sched: Implement last-CPU+PID hash tracking"
    to encode some bits from the last accessing task in the page flags as
    well as the node information. Collisions will occur but it is better than
    just depending on the node information. Node information is then used to
    determine if a page needs to migrate. The PID information is used to detect
    private/shared accesses. The preferred NUMA node is selected based on where
    the maximum number of approximately private faults were measured. Shared
    faults are not taken into consideration for a few reasons.

    First, if there are many tasks sharing the page then they'll all move
    towards the same node. The node will be compute overloaded and then
    scheduled away later only to bounce back again. Alternatively the shared
    tasks would just bounce around nodes because the fault information is
    effectively noise. Either way accounting for shared faults the same as
    private faults can result in lower performance overall.

    The second reason is based on a hypothetical workload that has a small
    number of very important, heavily accessed private pages but a large shared
    array. The shared array would dominate the number of faults and be selected
    as a preferred node even though it's the wrong decision.

    The third reason is that multiple threads in a process will race each
    other to fault the shared page making the fault information unreliable.

    Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman
    [ Fix complication error when !NUMA_BALANCING. ]
    Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel
    Cc: Andrea Arcangeli
    Cc: Johannes Weiner
    Cc: Srikar Dronamraju
    Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1381141781-10992-30-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Mel Gorman
     

24 Feb, 2013

2 commits

  • page->_last_nid fits into page->flags on 64-bit. The unlikely 32-bit
    NUMA configuration with NUMA Balancing will still need an extra page
    field. As Peter notes "Completely dropping 32bit support for
    CONFIG_NUMA_BALANCING would simplify things, but it would also remove
    the warning if we grow enough 64bit only page-flags to push the last-cpu
    out."

    [mgorman@suse.de: minor modifications]
    Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra
    Cc: Andrea Arcangeli
    Cc: Ingo Molnar
    Cc: Simon Jeons
    Cc: Wanpeng Li
    Cc: Hugh Dickins
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Peter Zijlstra
     
  • This is a preparation patch for moving page->_last_nid into page->flags
    that moves page flag layout information to a separate header. This
    patch is necessary because otherwise there would be a circular
    dependency between mm_types.h and mm.h.

    Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra
    Cc: Andrea Arcangeli
    Cc: Ingo Molnar
    Cc: Simon Jeons
    Cc: Wanpeng Li
    Cc: Hugh Dickins
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Peter Zijlstra