Changes since v6 [1]: * Simplify the review, drop the autodetect patches from the series. That work simply results in a single call to page_alloc_shuffle(SHUFFLE_ENABLE) injected at the right location during ACPI NUMA initialization / parsing of the HMAT (Heterogeneous Memory Attributes Table). That is purely a follow-on consideration once the base shuffle implementation and definition of page_alloc_shuffle() is accepted. The end result for this series is that the command line parameter "page_alloc.shuffle" is required to enable the randomization. * Fix declaration of page_alloc_shuffle() in the CONFIG_SHUFFLE_PAGE_ALLOCATOR=n case. (0day) * Rebased on v5.0-rc1 [1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/17/1116 --- Hi Andrew, please consider this series for -mm only after Michal and Mel have had a chance to review and have their concerns addressed. --- Quote Patch 1: Randomization of the page allocator improves the average utilization of a direct-mapped memory-side-cache. Memory side caching is a platform capability that Linux has been previously exposed to in HPC (high-performance computing) environments on specialty platforms. In that instance it was a smaller pool of high-bandwidth-memory relative to higher-capacity / lower-bandwidth DRAM. Now, this capability is going to be found on general purpose server platforms where DRAM is a cache in front of higher latency persistent memory [2]. Robert offered an explanation of the state of the art of Linux interactions with memory-side-caches [3], and I copy it here: It's been a problem in the HPC space: http://www.nersc.gov/research-and-development/knl-cache-mode-performance-coe/ A kernel module called zonesort is available to try to help: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/xeon-phi-software and this abandoned patch series proposed that for the kernel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/23/195 Dan's patch series doesn't attempt to ensure buffers won't conflict, but also reduces the chance that the buffers will. This will make performance more consistent, albeit slower than "optimal" (which is near impossible to attain in a general-purpose kernel). That's better than forcing users to deploy remedies like: "To eliminate this gradual degradation, we have added a Stream measurement to the Node Health Check that follows each job; nodes are rebooted whenever their measured memory bandwidth falls below 300 GB/s." A replacement for zonesort was merged upstream in commit cc9aec03e58f "x86/numa_emulation: Introduce uniform split capability". With this numa_emulation capability, memory can be split into cache sized ("near-memory" sized) numa nodes. A bind operation to such a node, and disabling workloads on other nodes, enables full cache performance. However, once the workload exceeds the cache size then cache conflicts are unavoidable. While HPC environments might be able to tolerate time-scheduling of cache sized workloads, for general purpose server platforms, the oversubscribed cache case will be the common case. The worst case scenario is that a server system owner benchmarks a workload at boot with an un-contended cache only to see that performance degrade over time, even below the average cache performance due to excessive conflicts. Randomization clips the peaks and fills in the valleys of cache utilization to yield steady average performance. See patch 1 for more details. [2]: https://itpeernetwork.intel.com/intel-optane-dc-persistent-memory-operating-modes/ [3]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/22/54 --- Dan Williams (3): mm: Shuffle initial free memory to improve memory-side-cache utilization mm: Move buddy list manipulations into helpers mm: Maintain randomization of page free lists include/linux/list.h | 17 +++ include/linux/mm.h | 3 - include/linux/mm_types.h | 3 + include/linux/mmzone.h | 65 +++++++++++++ include/linux/shuffle.h | 60 ++++++++++++ init/Kconfig | 36 +++++++ mm/Makefile | 7 + mm/compaction.c | 4 - mm/memblock.c | 10 ++ mm/memory_hotplug.c | 3 + mm/page_alloc.c | 82 ++++++++-------- mm/shuffle.c | 231 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 12 files changed, 471 insertions(+), 50 deletions(-) create mode 100644 include/linux/shuffle.h create mode 100644 mm/shuffle.c
