Commit fc4d5c292b68ef02514d2072dcbf82d090c34875

Authored by David Howells
Committed by Linus Torvalds
1 parent 3a6be87fd1

nommu: make the initial mmap allocation excess behaviour Kconfig configurable

NOMMU mmap() has an option controlled by a sysctl variable that determines
whether the allocations made by do_mmap_private() should have the excess
space trimmed off and returned to the allocator.  Make the initial setting
of this variable a Kconfig configuration option.

The reason there can be excess space is that the allocator only allocates
in power-of-2 size chunks, but mmap()'s can be made in sizes that aren't a
power of 2.

There are two alternatives:

 (1) Keep the excess as dead space.  The dead space then remains unused for the
     lifetime of the mapping.  Mappings of shared objects such as libc, ld.so
     or busybox's text segment may retain their dead space forever.

 (2) Return the excess to the allocator.  This means that the dead space is
     limited to less than a page per mapping, but it means that for a transient
     process, there's more chance of fragmentation as the excess space may be
     reused fairly quickly.

During the boot process, a lot of transient processes are created, and
this can cause a lot of fragmentation as the pagecache and various slabs
grow greatly during this time.

By turning off the trimming of excess space during boot and disabling
batching of frees, Coldfire can manage to boot.

A better way of doing things might be to have /sbin/init turn this option
off.  By that point libc, ld.so and init - which are all long-duration
processes - have all been loaded and trimmed.

Reported-by: Lanttor Guo <lanttor.guo@freescale.com>
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Lanttor Guo <lanttor.guo@freescale.com>
Cc: Greg Ungerer <gerg@snapgear.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

Showing 2 changed files with 29 additions and 1 deletions Side-by-side Diff

... ... @@ -225,4 +225,32 @@
225 225  
226 226 config MMU_NOTIFIER
227 227 bool
  228 +
  229 +config NOMMU_INITIAL_TRIM_EXCESS
  230 + int "Turn on mmap() excess space trimming before booting"
  231 + depends on !MMU
  232 + default 1
  233 + help
  234 + The NOMMU mmap() frequently needs to allocate large contiguous chunks
  235 + of memory on which to store mappings, but it can only ask the system
  236 + allocator for chunks in 2^N*PAGE_SIZE amounts - which is frequently
  237 + more than it requires. To deal with this, mmap() is able to trim off
  238 + the excess and return it to the allocator.
  239 +
  240 + If trimming is enabled, the excess is trimmed off and returned to the
  241 + system allocator, which can cause extra fragmentation, particularly
  242 + if there are a lot of transient processes.
  243 +
  244 + If trimming is disabled, the excess is kept, but not used, which for
  245 + long-term mappings means that the space is wasted.
  246 +
  247 + Trimming can be dynamically controlled through a sysctl option
  248 + (/proc/sys/vm/nr_trim_pages) which specifies the minimum number of
  249 + excess pages there must be before trimming should occur, or zero if
  250 + no trimming is to occur.
  251 +
  252 + This option specifies the initial value of this option. The default
  253 + of 1 says that all excess pages should be trimmed.
  254 +
  255 + See Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt for more information.
... ... @@ -66,7 +66,7 @@
66 66 int sysctl_overcommit_memory = OVERCOMMIT_GUESS; /* heuristic overcommit */
67 67 int sysctl_overcommit_ratio = 50; /* default is 50% */
68 68 int sysctl_max_map_count = DEFAULT_MAX_MAP_COUNT;
69   -int sysctl_nr_trim_pages = 1; /* page trimming behaviour */
  69 +int sysctl_nr_trim_pages = CONFIG_NOMMU_INITIAL_TRIM_EXCESS;
70 70 int heap_stack_gap = 0;
71 71  
72 72 atomic_long_t mmap_pages_allocated;