This patch makes reiserfs to use AOP_FLAG_CONT_EXPAND
in order to get rid of the special generic_cont_expand routine
Signed-off-by: Vladimir Saveliev <vs@namesys.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Convert reiserfs to new aops
Signed-off-by: Vladimir Saveliev <vs@namesys.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Make reiserfs to write via generic routines.
Original reiserfs write optimized for big writes is deadlock rone
Signed-off-by: Vladimir Saveliev <vs@namesys.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Rework the generic block "cont" routines to handle the new aops. Supporting
cont_prepare_write would take quite a lot of code to support, so remove it
instead (and we later convert all filesystems to use it).
write_begin gets passed AOP_FLAG_CONT_EXPAND when called from
generic_cont_expand, so filesystems can avoid the old hacks they used.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Various fixes and improvements
Signed-off-by: Badari Pulavarty <pbadari@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Implement new aops for some of the simpler filesystems.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Restore the KERNEL_DS optimisation, especially helpful to the 2copy write
path.
This may be a pretty questionable gain in most cases, especially after the
legacy 2copy write path is removed, but it doesn't cost much.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Partial write can be easily supported by LO_CRYPT_NONE mode, but it is not
easy in LO_CRYPT_CRYPTOAPI case, because of its block nature. I don't know
who still used cryptoapi, but theoretically it is possible. So let's leave
things as they are. Loop device doesn't support partial write before
Nick's "write_begin/write_end" patch set, and let's it behave the same way
after.
Signed-off-by: Dmitriy Monakhov <dmonakhov@openvz.org>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
These are intended to replace prepare_write and commit_write with more
flexible alternatives that are also able to avoid the buffered write
deadlock problems efficiently (which prepare_write is unable to do).
[mark.fasheh@oracle.com: API design contributions, code review and fixes]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: various fixes]
[dmonakhov@sw.ru: new aop block_write_begin fix]
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Mark Fasheh <mark.fasheh@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Dmitriy Monakhov <dmonakhov@openvz.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
New buffers against uptodate pages are simply be marked uptodate, while the
buffer_new bit remains set. This causes error-case code to zero out parts of
those buffers because it thinks they contain stale data: wrong, they are
actually uptodate so this is a data loss situation.
Fix this by actually clearning buffer_new and marking the buffer dirty. It
makes sense to always clear buffer_new before setting a buffer uptodate.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Add an iterator data structure to operate over an iovec. Add usercopy
operators needed by generic_file_buffered_write, and convert that function
over.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Modify the core write() code so that it won't take a pagefault while holding a
lock on the pagecache page. There are a number of different deadlocks possible
if we try to do such a thing:
1. generic_buffered_write
2. lock_page
3. prepare_write
4. unlock_page+vmtruncate
5. copy_from_user
6. mmap_sem(r)
7. handle_mm_fault
8. lock_page (filemap_nopage)
9. commit_write
10. unlock_page
a. sys_munmap / sys_mlock / others
b. mmap_sem(w)
c. make_pages_present
d. get_user_pages
e. handle_mm_fault
f. lock_page (filemap_nopage)
2,8 - recursive deadlock if page is same
2,8;2,8 - ABBA deadlock is page is different
2,6;b,f - ABBA deadlock if page is same
The solution is as follows:
1. If we find the destination page is uptodate, continue as normal, but use
atomic usercopies which do not take pagefaults and do not zero the uncopied
tail of the destination. The destination is already uptodate, so we can
commit_write the full length even if there was a partial copy: it does not
matter that the tail was not modified, because if it is dirtied and written
back to disk it will not cause any problems (uptodate *means* that the
destination page is as new or newer than the copy on disk).
1a. The above requires that fault_in_pages_readable correctly returns access
information, because atomic usercopies cannot distinguish between
non-present pages in a readable mapping, from lack of a readable mapping.
2. If we find the destination page is non uptodate, unlock it (this could be
made slightly more optimal), then allocate a temporary page to copy the
source data into. Relock the destination page and continue with the copy.
However, instead of a usercopy (which might take a fault), copy the data
from the pinned temporary page via the kernel address space.
(also, rename maxlen to seglen, because it was confusing)
This increases the CPU/memory copy cost by almost 50% on the affected
workloads. That will be solved by introducing a new set of pagecache write
aops in a subsequent patch.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Hide some of the open-coded nr_segs tests into the iovec helpers. This is all
to simplify generic_file_buffered_write, because that gets more complex in the
next patch.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Quite a bit of code is used in maintaining these "cached pages" that are
probably pretty unlikely to get used. It would require a narrow race where
the page is inserted concurrently while this process is allocating a page
in order to create the spare page. Then a multi-page write into an uncached
part of the file, to make use of it.
Next, the buffered write path (and others) uses its own LRU pagevec when it
should be just using the per-CPU LRU pagevec (which will cut down on both data
and code size cacheline footprint). Also, these private LRU pagevecs are
emptied after just a very short time, in contrast with the per-CPU pagevecs
that are persistent. Net result: 7.3 times fewer lru_lock acquisitions required
to add the pages to pagecache for a bulk write (in 4K chunks).
[this gets rid of some cond_resched() calls in readahead.c and mpage.c due
to clashes in -mm. What put them there, and why? ]
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
If prepare_write fails with AOP_TRUNCATED_PAGE, or if commit_write fails, then
we may have failed the write operation despite prepare_write having
instantiated blocks past i_size. Fix this, and consolidate the trimming into
one place.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Allow CONFIG_DEBUG_VM to switch off the prefaulting logic, to simulate the
Makes the race much easier to hit.
This is useful for demonstration and testing purposes, but is removed in a
subsequent patch.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Rename some variables and fix some types.
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This reverts commit 6527c2bdf1, which
fixed the following bug:
When prefaulting in the pages in generic_file_buffered_write(), we only
faulted in the pages for the firts segment of the iovec. If the second of
successive segment described a mmapping of the page into which we're
write()ing, and that page is not up-to-date, the fault handler tries to lock
the already-locked page (to bring it up to date) and deadlocks.
An exploit for this bug is in writev-deadlock-demo.c, in
http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/ext3-tools.tar.gz.
(These demos assume blocksize < PAGE_CACHE_SIZE).
The problem with this fix is that it takes the kernel back to doing a single
prepare_write()/commit_write() per iovec segment. So in the worst case we'll
run prepare_write+commit_write 1024 times where we previously would have run
it once. The other problem with the fix is that it fix all the locking problems.
<insert numbers obtained via ext3-tools's writev-speed.c here>
And apparently this change killed NFS overwrite performance, because, I
suppose, it talks to the server for each prepare_write+commit_write.
So just back that patch out - we'll be fixing the deadlock by other means.
Nick says: also it only ever actually papered over the bug, because after
faulting in the pages, they might be unmapped or reclaimed.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This reverts commit 81b0c87133, which was
a bugfix against 6527c2bdf1 ("[PATCH]
generic_file_buffered_write(): deadlock on vectored write"), which we
also revert.
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Revert the patch from Neil Brown to optimise NFSD writev handling.
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
While running some memory intensive load, system response deteriorated just
after swap-out started.
The cause of this problem is that when a PG_reclaim page is moved to the tail
of the inactive LRU list in rotate_reclaimable_page(), lru_lock spin lock is
acquired every page writeback . This deteriorates system performance and
makes interrupt hold off time longer when swap-out started.
Following patch solves this problem. I use pagevec in rotating reclaimable
pages to mitigate LRU spin lock contention and reduce interrupt hold off time.
I did a test that allocating and touching pages in multiple processes, and
pinging to the test machine in flooding mode to measure response under memory
intensive load.
The test result is:
-2.6.23-rc5
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 53222ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.074/0.652/172.228/7.176 ms, pipe 11, ipg/ewma
17.746/0.092 ms
-2.6.23-rc5-patched
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 51924ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.072/0.108/3.884/0.114 ms, pipe 2, ipg/ewma
17.314/0.091 ms
Max round-trip-time was improved.
The test machine spec is that 4CPU(3.16GHz, Hyper-threading enabled)
8GB memory , 8GB swap.
I did ping test again to observe performance deterioration caused by taking
a ref.
-2.6.23-rc6-with-modifiedpatch
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 53386ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.074/0.110/4.716/0.147 ms, pipe 2, ipg/ewma 17.801/0.129 ms
The result for my original patch is as follows.
-2.6.23-rc5-with-originalpatch
--- testmachine ping statistics ---
3000 packets transmitted, 3000 received, 0% packet loss, time 51924ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.072/0.108/3.884/0.114 ms, pipe 2, ipg/ewma 17.314/0.091 ms
The influence to response was small.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix uninitalised var warning]
[hugh@veritas.com: fix locking]
[randy.dunlap@oracle.com: fix function declaration]
[hugh@veritas.com: fix BUG at include/linux/mm.h:220!]
[hugh@veritas.com: kill redundancy in rotate_reclaimable_page]
[hugh@veritas.com: move_tail_pages into lru_add_drain]
Signed-off-by: Hisashi Hifumi <hifumi.hisashi@oss.ntt.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Allow an application to query the memories allowed by its context.
Updated numa_memory_policy.txt to mention that applications can use this to
obtain allowed memories for constructing valid policies.
TODO: update out-of-tree libnuma wrapper[s], or maybe add a new
wrapper--e.g., numa_get_mems_allowed() ?
Also, update numa syscall man pages.
Tested with memtoy V>=0.13.
Signed-off-by: Lee Schermerhorn <lee.schermerhorn@hp.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The current VM can get itself into trouble fairly easily on systems with a
small ZONE_HIGHMEM, which is common on i686 computers with 1GB of memory.
On one side, page_alloc() will allocate down to zone->pages_low, while on
the other side, kswapd() and balance_pgdat() will try to free memory from
every zone, until every zone has more free pages than zone->pages_high.
Highmem can be filled up to zone->pages_low with page tables, ramfs,
vmalloc allocations and other unswappable things quite easily and without
many bad side effects, since we still have a huge ZONE_NORMAL to do future
allocations from.
However, as long as the number of free pages in the highmem zone is below
zone->pages_high, kswapd will continue swapping things out from
ZONE_NORMAL, too!
Sami Farin managed to get his system into a stage where kswapd had freed
about 700MB of low memory and was still "going strong".
The attached patch will make kswapd stop paging out data from zones when
there is more than enough memory free. We do go above zone->pages_high in
order to keep pressure between zones equal in normal circumstances, but the
patch should prevent the kind of excesses that made Sami's computer totally
unusable.
Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
vmalloc() returns a void pointer, so there's no need to cast its
return value in mm/page_alloc.c::zone_wait_table_init().
Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
A while back, Nick Piggin introduced a patch to reduce the node memory
usage for small files (commit cfd9b7df4a):
-#define RADIX_TREE_MAP_SHIFT 6
+#define RADIX_TREE_MAP_SHIFT (CONFIG_BASE_SMALL ? 4 : 6)
Unfortunately, he didn't take into account the fact that the
calculation of the maximum path was based on an assumption of having
to round up:
#define RADIX_TREE_MAX_PATH (RADIX_TREE_INDEX_BITS/RADIX_TREE_MAP_SHIFT + 2)
So, if CONFIG_BASE_SMALL is set, you will end up with a
RADIX_TREE_MAX_PATH that is one greater than necessary. The practical
upshot of this is just a bit of wasted memory (one long in the
height_to_maxindex array, an extra pre-allocated radix tree node per
cpu, and extra stack usage in a couple of functions), but it seems
worth getting right.
It's also worth noting that I never build with CONFIG_BASE_SMALL.
What I did to test this was duplicate the code in a small user-space
program and check the results of the calculations for max path and the
contents of the height_to_maxindex array.
Signed-off-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
nobh mode error handling is not just pretty slack, it's wrong.
One cannot zero out the whole page to ensure new blocks are zeroed, because
it just brings the whole page "uptodate" with zeroes even if that may not
be the correct uptodate data. Also, other parts of the page may already
contain dirty data which would get lost by zeroing it out. Thirdly, the
writeback of zeroes to the new blocks will also erase existing blocks. All
these conditions are pagecache and/or filesystem corruption.
The problem comes about because we didn't keep track of which buffers
actually are new or old. However it is not enough just to keep only this
state, because at the point we start dirtying parts of the page (new
blocks, with zeroes), the handling of IO errors becomes impossible without
buffers because the page may only be partially uptodate, in which case the
page flags allone cannot capture the state of the parts of the page.
So allocate all buffers for the page upfront, but leave them unattached so
that they don't pick up any other references and can be freed when we're
done. If the error path is hit, then zero the new buffers as the regular
buffer path does, then attach the buffers to the page so that it can
actually be written out correctly and be subject to the normal IO error
handling paths.
As an upshot, we save 1K of kernel stack on ia64 or powerpc 64K page
systems.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
A NULL pointer means that the object was not allocated. One cannot
determine the size of an object that has not been allocated. Currently we
return 0 but we really should BUG() on attempts to determine the size of
something nonexistent.
krealloc() interprets NULL to mean a zero sized object. Handle that
separately in krealloc().
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The calculation of pgoff in do_linear_fault() should use PAGE_SHIFT and not
PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT since vma->vm_pgoff is in units of PAGE_SIZE and not
PAGE_CACHE_SIZE. At the moment linux/pagemap.h has PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT
defined as PAGE_SHIFT, but should that ever change this calculation would
break.
Signed-off-by: Dean Nelson <dcn@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Considering kfree(NULL) would normally occur only in error paths and
kfree(ZERO_SIZE_PTR) is uncommon as well, so let's use unlikely() for the
condition check in SLUB's and SLOB's kfree() to optimize for the common
case. SLAB has this already.
Signed-off-by: Satyam Sharma <satyam@infradead.org>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Move the definitions of struct mm_struct and struct vma_area_struct to
include/mm_types.h. This allows to define more function in asm/pgtable.h
and friends with inline assemblies instead of macros. Compile tested on
i386, powerpc, powerpc64, s390-32, s390-64 and x86_64.
[aurelien@aurel32.net: build fix]
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Rather than sign direct radix-tree pointers with a special bit, sign the
indirect one that hangs off the root. This means that, given a lookup_slot
operation, the invalid result will be differentiated from the valid
(previously, valid results could have the bit either set or clear).
This does not affect slot lookups which occur under lock -- they can never
return an invalid result. Is needed in future for lockless pagecache.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
__add_to_swap_cache unconditionally sets the page locked, which can be a bit
alarming to the unsuspecting reader: in the code paths where the page is
visible to other CPUs, the page should be (and is) already locked.
Instead, just add a check to ensure the page is locked here, and teach the one
path relying on the old behaviour to call SetPageLocked itself.
[hugh@veritas.com: locking fix]
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
find_lock_page does not need to recheck ->index because if the page is in the
right mapping then the index must be the same. Also, tree_lock does not need
to be retaken after the page is locked in order to test that ->mapping has not
changed, because holding the page lock pins its mapping.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Probing pages and radix_tree_tagged are lockless operations with the lockless
radix-tree. Convert these users to RCU locking rather than using tree_lock.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The commit b5810039a5 contains the note
A last caveat: the ZERO_PAGE is now refcounted and managed with rmap
(and thus mapcounted and count towards shared rss). These writes to
the struct page could cause excessive cacheline bouncing on big
systems. There are a number of ways this could be addressed if it is
an issue.
And indeed this cacheline bouncing has shown up on large SGI systems.
There was a situation where an Altix system was essentially livelocked
tearing down ZERO_PAGE pagetables when an HPC app aborted during startup.
This situation can be avoided in userspace, but it does highlight the
potential scalability problem with refcounting ZERO_PAGE, and corner
cases where it can really hurt (we don't want the system to livelock!).
There are several broad ways to fix this problem:
1. add back some special casing to avoid refcounting ZERO_PAGE
2. per-node or per-cpu ZERO_PAGES
3. remove the ZERO_PAGE completely
I will argue for 3. The others should also fix the problem, but they
result in more complex code than does 3, with little or no real benefit
that I can see.
Why? Inserting a ZERO_PAGE for anonymous read faults appears to be a
false optimisation: if an application is performance critical, it would
not be doing many read faults of new memory, or at least it could be
expected to write to that memory soon afterwards. If cache or memory use
is critical, it should not be working with a significant number of
ZERO_PAGEs anyway (a more compact representation of zeroes should be
used).
As a sanity check -- mesuring on my desktop system, there are never many
mappings to the ZERO_PAGE (eg. 2 or 3), thus memory usage here should not
increase much without it.
When running a make -j4 kernel compile on my dual core system, there are
about 1,000 mappings to the ZERO_PAGE created per second, but about 1,000
ZERO_PAGE COW faults per second (less than 1 ZERO_PAGE mapping per second
is torn down without being COWed). So removing ZERO_PAGE will save 1,000
page faults per second when running kbuild, while keeping it only saves
less than 1 page clearing operation per second. 1 page clear is cheaper
than a thousand faults, presumably, so there isn't an obvious loss.
Neither the logical argument nor these basic tests give a guarantee of no
regressions. However, this is a reasonable opportunity to try to remove
the ZERO_PAGE from the pagefault path. If it is found to cause regressions,
we can reintroduce it and just avoid refcounting it.
The /dev/zero ZERO_PAGE usage and TLB tricks also get nuked. I don't see
much use to them except on benchmarks. All other users of ZERO_PAGE are
converted just to use ZERO_PAGE(0) for simplicity. We can look at
replacing them all and maybe ripping out ZERO_PAGE completely when we are
more satisfied with this solution.
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus "snif" Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>