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Aaron Lu 97334162e4 mm/free_pcppages_bulk: prefetch buddy while not holding lock
When a page is freed back to the global pool, its buddy will be checked
to see if it's possible to do a merge.  This requires accessing buddy's
page structure and that access could take a long time if it's cache
cold.

This patch adds a prefetch to the to-be-freed page's buddy outside of
zone->lock in hope of accessing buddy's page structure later under
zone->lock will be faster.  Since we *always* do buddy merging and check
an order-0 page's buddy to try to merge it when it goes into the main
allocator, the cacheline will always come in, i.e.  the prefetched data
will never be unused.

Normally, the number of prefetch will be pcp->batch(default=31 and has
an upper limit of (PAGE_SHIFT * 8)=96 on x86_64) but in the case of
pcp's pages get all drained, it will be pcp->count which has an upper
limit of pcp->high.  pcp->high, although has a default value of 186
(pcp->batch=31 * 6), can be changed by user through
/proc/sys/vm/percpu_pagelist_fraction and there is no software upper
limit so could be large, like several thousand.  For this reason, only
the first pcp->batch number of page's buddy structure is prefetched to
avoid excessive prefetching.

In the meantime, there are two concerns:

 1. the prefetch could potentially evict existing cachelines, especially
    for L1D cache since it is not huge

 2. there is some additional instruction overhead, namely calculating
    buddy pfn twice

For 1, it's hard to say, this microbenchmark though shows good result
but the actual benefit of this patch will be workload/CPU dependant;

For 2, since the calculation is a XOR on two local variables, it's
expected in many cases that cycles spent will be offset by reduced
memory latency later.  This is especially true for NUMA machines where
multiple CPUs are contending on zone->lock and the most time consuming
part under zone->lock is the wait of 'struct page' cacheline of the
to-be-freed pages and their buddies.

Test with will-it-scale/page_fault1 full load:

  kernel      Broadwell(2S)  Skylake(2S)   Broadwell(4S)  Skylake(4S)
  v4.16-rc2+  9034215        7971818       13667135       15677465
  patch2/3    9536374 +5.6%  8314710 +4.3% 14070408 +3.0% 16675866 +6.4%
  this patch 10180856 +6.8%  8506369 +2.3% 14756865 +4.9% 17325324 +3.9%

Note: this patch's performance improvement percent is against patch2/3.

(Changelog stolen from Dave Hansen and Mel Gorman's comments at
http://lkml.kernel.org/r/148a42d8-8306-2f2f-7f7c-86bc118f8ccd@intel.com)

[aaron.lu@intel.com: use helper function, avoid disordering pages]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180301062845.26038-4-aaron.lu@intel.com
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180320113146.GB24737@intel.com
[aaron.lu@intel.com: v4]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180301062845.26038-4-aaron.lu@intel.com
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180309082431.GB30868@intel.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180301062845.26038-4-aaron.lu@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@intel.com>
Suggested-by: Ying Huang <ying.huang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Kemi Wang <kemi.wang@intel.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2018-04-05 21:36:26 -07:00
Documentation mm, page_alloc: extend kernelcore and movablecore for percent 2018-04-05 21:36:25 -07:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Add MPL-1.1 license 2018-01-06 10:59:44 -07:00
arch x86/mm/memory_hotplug: determine block size based on the end of boot memory 2018-04-05 21:36:25 -07:00
block Char/Misc patches for 4.17-rc1 2018-04-04 20:07:20 -07:00
certs certs/blacklist_nohashes.c: fix const confusion in certs blacklist 2018-02-21 15:35:43 -08:00
crypto Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2018-04-04 17:11:08 -07:00
drivers mm/memory_hotplug: optimize memory hotplug 2018-04-05 21:36:25 -07:00
firmware kbuild: remove all dummy assignments to obj- 2017-11-18 11:46:06 +09:00
fs fs: don't flush pagecache when expanding block device 2018-04-05 21:36:23 -07:00
include mm: make should_failslab always available for fault injection 2018-04-05 21:36:26 -07:00
init Merge branch 'syscalls-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/brodo/linux 2018-04-02 21:22:12 -07:00
ipc Merge branch 'userns-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace 2018-04-03 19:15:32 -07:00
kernel Driver core patches for 4.17-rc1 2018-04-04 19:41:45 -07:00
lib lib: fix stall in __bitmap_parselist() 2018-04-05 21:36:21 -07:00
mm mm/free_pcppages_bulk: prefetch buddy while not holding lock 2018-04-05 21:36:26 -07:00
net net/9p/client.c: fix potential refcnt problem of trans module 2018-04-05 21:36:23 -07:00
samples Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-next 2018-04-03 14:04:18 -07:00
scripts scripts/faddr2line: show the code context 2018-04-05 21:36:21 -07:00
security Merge branch 'userns-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace 2018-04-03 19:15:32 -07:00
sound Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-next 2018-04-03 14:04:18 -07:00
tools Char/Misc patches for 4.17-rc1 2018-04-04 20:07:20 -07:00
usr kbuild: rename built-in.o to built-in.a 2018-03-26 02:01:19 +09:00
virt kvm/arm fixes for 4.16, take 2 2018-03-15 21:45:37 +01:00
.cocciconfig
.get_maintainer.ignore
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set git diff driver for C source code files 2016-10-07 18:46:30 -07:00
.gitignore kbuild: move include/config/ksym/* to include/ksym/* 2018-03-26 02:01:23 +09:00
.mailmap Merge remote-tracking branch 'spi/topic/samsung' into spi-next 2018-04-02 15:56:32 +01:00
COPYING COPYING: use the new text with points to the license files 2018-03-23 12:41:45 -06:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS/CREDITS: Drop METAG ARCHITECTURE 2018-03-05 16:34:24 +00:00
Kbuild Kbuild updates for v4.15 2017-11-17 17:45:29 -08:00
Kconfig License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license 2017-11-02 11:10:55 +01:00
MAINTAINERS Char/Misc patches for 4.17-rc1 2018-04-04 20:07:20 -07:00
Makefile Kconfig updates for v4.17 2018-04-03 16:28:01 -07:00
README Docs: Added a pointer to the formatted docs to README 2018-03-21 09:02:53 -06:00

README

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.