As suggested by Linus, introduce a kern_ptr_validate() helper that does some
sanity checks to make sure a pointer is a valid kernel pointer. This is a
preparational step for fixing SLUB kmem_ptr_validate().
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch allow to inject faults only for specific slabs.
In order to preserve default behavior cache filter is off by
default (all caches are faulty).
One may define specific set of slabs like this:
# mark skbuff_head_cache as faulty
echo 1 > /sys/kernel/slab/skbuff_head_cache/failslab
# Turn on cache filter (off by default)
echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/cache-filter
# Turn on fault injection
echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/times
echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/failslab/probability
Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Acked-by: Akinobu Mita <akinobu.mita@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Dmitry Monakhov <dmonakhov@openvz.org>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
With kmemcheck enabled, the slab allocator needs to do this:
1. Tell kmemcheck to allocate the shadow memory which stores the status of
each byte in the allocation proper, e.g. whether it is initialized or
uninitialized.
2. Tell kmemcheck which parts of memory that should be marked uninitialized.
There are actually a few more states, such as "not yet allocated" and
"recently freed".
If a slab cache is set up using the SLAB_NOTRACK flag, it will never return
memory that can take page faults because of kmemcheck.
If a slab cache is NOT set up using the SLAB_NOTRACK flag, callers can still
request memory with the __GFP_NOTRACK flag. This does not prevent the page
faults from occuring, however, but marks the object in question as being
initialized so that no warnings will ever be produced for this object.
In addition to (and in contrast to) __GFP_NOTRACK, the
__GFP_NOTRACK_FALSE_POSITIVE flag indicates that the allocation should
not be tracked _because_ it would produce a false positive. Their values
are identical, but need not be so in the future (for example, we could now
enable/disable false positives with a config option).
Parts of this patch were contributed by Pekka Enberg but merged for
atomicity.
Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
[rebased for mainline inclusion]
Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
As explained by Benjamin Herrenschmidt:
Oh and btw, your patch alone doesn't fix powerpc, because it's missing
a whole bunch of GFP_KERNEL's in the arch code... You would have to
grep the entire kernel for things that check slab_is_available() and
even then you'll be missing some.
For example, slab_is_available() didn't always exist, and so in the
early days on powerpc, we used a mem_init_done global that is set form
mem_init() (not perfect but works in practice). And we still have code
using that to do the test.
Therefore, mask out __GFP_WAIT, __GFP_IO, and __GFP_FS in the slab allocators
in early boot code to avoid enabling interrupts.
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
This patch adds the callbacks to kmemleak_(alloc|free) functions from
the slab allocator. The patch also adds the SLAB_NOLEAKTRACE flag to
avoid recursive calls to kmemleak when it allocates its own data
structures.
Signed-off-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
kzfree() is a wrapper for kfree() that additionally zeroes the underlying
memory before releasing it to the slab allocator.
Currently there is code which memset()s the memory region of an object
before releasing it back to the slab allocator to make sure
security-sensitive data are really zeroed out after use.
These callsites can then just use kzfree() which saves some code, makes
users greppable and allows for a stupid destructor that isn't necessarily
aware of the actual object size.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This #endif in slab.h is described as closing the inner block while it's for
the big CONFIG_NUMA one. That makes reading the code a bit harder.
This trivial patch fixes the comment.
Signed-off-by: Pascal Terjan <pterjan@mandriva.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
This patch replaces __builtin_return_address(0) with _RET_IP_, since a
previous patch moved _RET_IP_ and _THIS_IP_ to include/linux/kernel.h and
they're widely available now. This makes for shorter and easier to read
code.
[penberg@cs.helsinki.fi: remove _RET_IP_ casts to void pointer]
Signed-off-by: Eduard - Gabriel Munteanu <eduard.munteanu@linux360.ro>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Explain this SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU thing...
[hugh@veritas.com: add a pointer to comment in mm/slab.c]
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Lose dummy ->write hook in case of SLUB, it's possible now.
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
* git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-2.6:
netns: fix ip_rt_frag_needed rt_is_expired
netfilter: nf_conntrack_extend: avoid unnecessary "ct->ext" dereferences
netfilter: fix double-free and use-after free
netfilter: arptables in netns for real
netfilter: ip{,6}tables_security: fix future section mismatch
selinux: use nf_register_hooks()
netfilter: ebtables: use nf_register_hooks()
Revert "pkt_sched: sch_sfq: dump a real number of flows"
qeth: use dev->ml_priv instead of dev->priv
syncookies: Make sure ECN is disabled
net: drop unused BUG_TRAP()
net: convert BUG_TRAP to generic WARN_ON
drivers/net: convert BUG_TRAP to generic WARN_ON
As suggested by Patrick McHardy, introduce a __krealloc() that doesn't
free the original buffer to fix a double-free and use-after-free bug
introduced by me in netfilter that uses RCU.
Reported-by: Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Tested-by: Dieter Ries <clip2@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Kmem cache passed to constructor is only needed for constructors that are
themselves multiplexeres. Nobody uses this "feature", nor does anybody uses
passed kmem cache in non-trivial way, so pass only pointer to object.
Non-trivial places are:
arch/powerpc/mm/init_64.c
arch/powerpc/mm/hugetlbpage.c
This is flag day, yes.
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Jon Tollefson <kniht@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix arch/powerpc/mm/hugetlbpage.c]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix mm/slab.c]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix ubifs]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
While in all cases in the kernel we know the size of the elements to be
created, we don't always know the count of elements. By commuting the size
and count in the overflow check, the compiler can reduce the runtime division
of size_t with a compare to a (unique) constant in these cases.
Signed-off-by: Milton Miller <miltonm@bga.com>
Cc: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Remove all clameter@sgi.com addresses from the kernel tree since they will
become invalid on June 27th. Change my maintainer email address for the
slab allocators to cl@linux-foundation.org (which will be the new email
address for the future).
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To get zeroed out memory from a particular NUMA node. To be used by
sunrpc.
Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Remove the "#ifdef __KERNEL__" tests from unexported header files in
linux/include whose entire contents are wrapped in that preprocessor
test.
Signed-off-by: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>
Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Cc: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This is a preperatory patch for the debugobjects infrastructure. The flag
prevents debug_free checks on kmem_caches. This is necessary to avoid
resursive calls into a debug mechanism which uses a kmem_cache itself.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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>
Both SLUB and SLAB really did almost exactly the same thing for
/proc/slabinfo setup, using duplicate code and per-allocator #ifdef's.
This just creates a common CONFIG_SLABINFO that is enabled by both SLUB
and SLAB, and shares all the setup code. Maybe SLOB will want this some
day too.
Reviewed-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Slab constructors currently have a flags parameter that is never used. And
the order of the arguments is opposite to other slab functions. The object
pointer is placed before the kmem_cache pointer.
Convert
ctor(void *object, struct kmem_cache *s, unsigned long flags)
to
ctor(struct kmem_cache *s, void *object)
throughout the kernel
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coupla fixes]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch marks a number of allocations that are either short-lived such as
network buffers or are reclaimable such as inode allocations. When something
like updatedb is called, long-lived and unmovable kernel allocations tend to
be spread throughout the address space which increases fragmentation.
This patch groups these allocations together as much as possible by adding a
new MIGRATE_TYPE. The MIGRATE_RECLAIMABLE type is for allocations that can be
reclaimed on demand, but not moved. i.e. they can be migrated by deleting
them and re-reading the information from elsewhere.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@shadowen.org>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
The comparison with ZERO_SIZE_PTR in ZERO_OR_NULL_PTR() needs to be <=
(not just <) so that ZERO_OR_NULL_PTR(ZERO_SIZE_PTR) is 1.
Signed-off-by: Roland Dreier <rolandd@cisco.com>
[ Duh! - Linus ]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Slab destructors were no longer supported after Christoph's
c59def9f22 change. They've been
BUGs for both slab and slub, and slob never supported them
either.
This rips out support for the dtor pointer from kmem_cache_create()
completely and fixes up every single callsite in the kernel (there were
about 224, not including the slab allocator definitions themselves,
or the documentation references).
Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
It becomes now easy to support the zeroing allocs with generic inline
functions in slab.h. Provide inline definitions to allow the continued use of
kzalloc, kmem_cache_zalloc etc but remove other definitions of zeroing
functions from the slab allocators and util.c.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Define ZERO_OR_NULL_PTR macro to be able to remove the checks from the
allocators. Move ZERO_SIZE_PTR related stuff into slab.h.
Make ZERO_SIZE_PTR work for all slab allocators and get rid of the
WARN_ON_ONCE(size == 0) that is still remaining in SLAB.
Make slub return NULL like the other allocators if a too large memory segment
is requested via __kmalloc.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This adds preliminary NUMA support to SLOB, primarily aimed at systems with
small nodes (tested all the way down to a 128kB SRAM block), whether
asymmetric or otherwise.
We follow the same conventions as SLAB/SLUB, preferring current node
placement for new pages, or with explicit placement, if a node has been
specified. Presently on UP NUMA this has the side-effect of preferring
node#0 allocations (since numa_node_id() == 0, though this could be
reworked if we could hand off a pfn to determine node placement), so
single-CPU NUMA systems will want to place smaller nodes further out in
terms of node id. Once a page has been bound to a node (via explicit node
id typing), we only do block allocations from partial free pages that have
a matching node id in the page flags.
The current implementation does have some scalability problems, in that all
partial free pages are tracked in the global freelist (with contention due
to the single spinlock). However, these are things that are being reworked
for SMP scalability first, while things like per-node freelists can easily
be built on top of this sort of functionality once it's been added.
More background can be found in:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=118117916022379&w=2http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=118170446306199&w=2http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=118187859420048&w=2
and subsequent threads.
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Acked-by: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
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>
Given that there is no remaining usage of the deprecated kmem_cache_t
typedef anywhere in the tree, remove that typedef.
Signed-off-by: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@mindspring.com>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
MAX_ORDER is the first order that is not possible.
Use MAX_ORDER - 1 to calculate the larges possible object size in slab.h
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Currently we have a maze of configuration variables that determine the
maximum slab size. Worst of all it seems to vary between SLAB and SLUB.
So define a common maximum size for kmalloc. For conveniences sake we use
the maximum size ever supported which is 32 MB. We limit the maximum size
to a lower limit if MAX_ORDER does not allow such large allocations.
For many architectures this patch will have the effect of adding large
kmalloc sizes. x86_64 adds 5 new kmalloc sizes. So a small amount of
memory will be needed for these caches (contemporary SLAB has dynamically
sizeable node and cpu structure so the waste is less than in the past)
Most architectures will then be able to allocate object with sizes up to
MAX_ORDER. We have had repeated breakage (in fact whenever we doubled the
number of supported processors) on IA64 because one or the other struct
grew beyond what the slab allocators supported. This will avoid future
issues and f.e. avoid fixes for 2k and 4k cpu support.
CONFIG_LARGE_ALLOCS is no longer necessary so drop it.
It fixes sparc64 with SLAB.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
SLAB_CTOR_CONSTRUCTOR is always specified. No point in checking it.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Steven French <sfrench@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Michael Halcrow <mhalcrow@us.ibm.com>
Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
Cc: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@austin.ibm.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Cc: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
Cc: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cantab.net>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mark.fasheh@oracle.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@ucw.cz>
Cc: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Two definitions remained in slab.h that are particular to the SLAB allocator.
Move to slab_def.h
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
SLAB_CTOR atomic is never used which is no surprise since I cannot imagine
that one would want to do something serious in a constructor or destructor.
In particular given that the slab allocators run with interrupts disabled.
Actions in constructors and destructors are by their nature very limited
and usually do not go beyond initializing variables and list operations.
(The i386 pgd ctor and dtors do take a spinlock in constructor and
destructor..... I think that is the furthest we go at this point.)
There is no flag passed to the destructor so removing SLAB_CTOR_ATOMIC also
establishes a certain symmetry.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
I have never seen a use of SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL. It is only supported by
SLAB.
I think its purpose was to have a callback after an object has been freed
to verify that the state is the constructor state again? The callback is
performed before each freeing of an object.
I would think that it is much easier to check the object state manually
before the free. That also places the check near the code object
manipulation of the object.
Also the SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL callback is only performed if the kernel was
compiled with SLAB debugging on. If there would be code in a constructor
handling SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL then it would have to be conditional on
SLAB_DEBUG otherwise it would just be dead code. But there is no such code
in the kernel. I think SLUB_DEBUG_INITIAL is too problematic to make real
use of, difficult to understand and there are easier ways to accomplish the
same effect (i.e. add debug code before kfree).
There is a related flag SLAB_CTOR_VERIFY that is frequently checked to be
clear in fs inode caches. Remove the pointless checks (they would even be
pointless without removeal of SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL) from the fs constructors.
This is the last slab flag that SLUB did not support. Remove the check for
unimplemented flags from SLUB.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch provides a new macro
KMEM_CACHE(<struct>, <flags>)
to simplify slab creation. KMEM_CACHE creates a slab with the name of the
struct, with the size of the struct and with the alignment of the struct.
Additional slab flags may be specified if necessary.
Example
struct test_slab {
int a,b,c;
struct list_head;
} __cacheline_aligned_in_smp;
test_slab_cache = KMEM_CACHE(test_slab, SLAB_PANIC)
will create a new slab named "test_slab" of the size sizeof(struct
test_slab) and aligned to the alignment of test slab. If it fails then we
panic.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch was recently posted to lkml and acked by Pekka.
The flag SLAB_MUST_HWCACHE_ALIGN is
1. Never checked by SLAB at all.
2. A duplicate of SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN for SLUB
3. Fulfills the role of SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN for SLOB.
The only remaining use is in sparc64 and ppc64 and their use there
reflects some earlier role that the slab flag once may have had. If
its specified then SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN is also specified.
The flag is confusing, inconsistent and has no purpose.
Remove it.
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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,<slabcache> 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 + Simulator
SLUB 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=<options> Enable selective options for all caches
slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of
caches
Available 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 <clameter@sgi.com>
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>
This introduce krealloc() that reallocates memory while keeping the contents
unchanged. The allocator avoids reallocation if the new size fits the
currently used cache. I also added a simple non-optimized version for
mm/slob.c for compatibility.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix warnings]
Acked-by: Josef Sipek <jsipek@fsl.cs.sunysb.edu>
Acked-by: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
More cleanups for slab.h
1. Remove tabs from weird locations as suggested by Pekka
2. Drop the check for NUMA and SLAB_DEBUG from the fallback section
as suggested by Pekka.
3. Uses static inline for the fallback defs as also suggested by Pekka.
4. Make kmem_ptr_valid take a const * argument.
5. Separate the NUMA fallback definitions from the kmalloc_track fallback
definitions.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This is a response to an earlier discussion on linux-mm about splitting
slab.h components per allocator. Patch is against 2.6.19-git11. See
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-mm&m=116469577431008&w=2
This patch cleans up the slab header definitions. We define the common
functions of slob and slab in slab.h and put the extra definitions needed
for slab's kmalloc implementations in <linux/slab_def.h>. In order to get
a greater set of common functions we add several empty functions to slob.c
and also rename slob's kmalloc to __kmalloc.
Slob does not need any special definitions since we introduce a fallback
case. If there is no need for a slab implementation to provide its own
kmalloc mess^H^H^Hacros then we simply fall back to __kmalloc functions.
That is sufficient for SLOB.
Sort the function in slab.h according to their functionality. First the
functions operating on struct kmem_cache * then the kmalloc related
functions followed by special debug and fallback definitions.
Also redo a lot of comments.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>?
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SLAB_DMA is an alias of GFP_DMA. This is the last one so we
remove the leftover comment too.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SLAB_KERNEL is an alias of GFP_KERNEL.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SLAB_ATOMIC is an alias of GFP_ATOMIC
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SLAB_USER is an alias of GFP_USER
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SLAB_NOFS is an alias of GFP_NOFS.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SLAB_NOIO is an alias of GFP_NOIO with a single instance of use.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SLAB_LEVEL_MASK is only used internally to the slab and is
and alias of GFP_LEVEL_MASK.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Pekka Enberg