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Author SHA1 Message Date
Hugh Dickins
8fdb3dbf02 ksm: add some comments
Added slightly more detail to the Documentation of merge_across_nodes, a
few comments in areas indicated by review, and renamed get_ksm_page()'s
argument from "locked" to "lock_it".  No functional change.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Petr Holasek <pholasek@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Izik Eidus <izik.eidus@ravellosystems.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-02-23 17:50:23 -08:00
Petr Holasek
90bd6fd31c ksm: allow trees per NUMA node
Here's a KSM series, based on mmotm 2013-01-23-17-04: starting with
Petr's v7 "KSM: numa awareness sysfs knob"; then fixing the two issues
we had with that, fully enabling KSM page migration on the way.

(A different kind of KSM/NUMA issue which I've certainly not begun to
address here: when KSM pages are unmerged, there's usually no sense in
preferring to allocate the new pages local to the caller's node.)

This patch:

Introduces new sysfs boolean knob /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/merge_across_nodes
which control merging pages across different numa nodes.  When it is set
to zero only pages from the same node are merged, otherwise pages from
all nodes can be merged together (default behavior).

Typical use-case could be a lot of KVM guests on NUMA machine and cpus
from more distant nodes would have significant increase of access
latency to the merged ksm page.  Sysfs knob was choosen for higher
variability when some users still prefers higher amount of saved
physical memory regardless of access latency.

Every numa node has its own stable & unstable trees because of faster
searching and inserting.  Changing of merge_across_nodes value is
possible only when there are not any ksm shared pages in system.

I've tested this patch on numa machines with 2, 4 and 8 nodes and
measured speed of memory access inside of KVM guests with memory pinned
to one of nodes with this benchmark:

  http://pholasek.fedorapeople.org/alloc_pg.c

Population standard deviations of access times in percentage of average
were following:

merge_across_nodes=1
2 nodes 1.4%
4 nodes 1.6%
8 nodes	1.7%

merge_across_nodes=0
2 nodes	1%
4 nodes	0.32%
8 nodes	0.018%

RFC: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/30/91
v1: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/23/46
v2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/29/105
v3: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/14/550
v4: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/23/137
v5: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/10/540
v6: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/154
v7: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/27/225

Hugh notes that this patch brings two problems, whose solution needs
further support in mm/ksm.c, which follows in subsequent patches:

1) switching merge_across_nodes after running KSM is liable to oops
   on stale nodes still left over from the previous stable tree;

2) memory hotremove may migrate KSM pages, but there is no provision
   here for !merge_across_nodes to migrate nodes to the proper tree.

Signed-off-by: Petr Holasek <pholasek@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Izik Eidus <izik.eidus@ravellosystems.com>
Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-02-23 17:50:19 -08:00
Hugh Dickins
d0f209f68f ksm: remove unswappable max_kernel_pages
Now that ksm pages are swappable, and the known holes plugged, remove
mention of unswappable kernel pages from KSM documentation and comments.

Remove the totalram_pages/4 initialization of max_kernel_pages.  In fact,
remove max_kernel_pages altogether - we can reinstate it if removal turns
out to break someone's script; but if we later want to limit KSM's memory
usage, limiting the stable nodes would not be an effective approach.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Cc: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-12-15 08:53:20 -08:00
Hugh Dickins
c73602ad31 ksm: more on default values
Adjust the max_kernel_pages default to a quarter of totalram_pages,
instead of nr_free_buffer_pages() / 4: the KSM pages themselves come from
highmem, and even on a 16GB PAE machine, 4GB of KSM pages would only be
pinning 32MB of lowmem with their rmap_items, so no need for the more
obscure calculation (nor for its own special init function).

There is no way for the user to switch KSM on if CONFIG_SYSFS is not
enabled, so in that case default run to KSM_RUN_MERGE.

Update KSM Documentation and Kconfig to reflect the new defaults.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Cc: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-10-08 07:36:38 -07:00
Hugh Dickins
7701c9c0f5 ksm: add some documentation
Add Documentation/vm/ksm.txt: how to use the Kernel Samepage Merging feature

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-09-22 07:17:33 -07:00