On Thu, Jun 04, 2020 at 09:22:03AM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 04.06.20 05:54, Daniel Jordan wrote:
> > Some of our servers spend 14 out of the 21 seconds of kernel boot
> > initializing memory block sysfs directories and then creating symlinks
> > between them and the corresponding nodes. The slowness happens because
> > the machines get stuck with the smallest supported memory block size on
> > x86 (128M), which results in 16,288 directories to cover the 2T of
> > installed RAM, and each of these paths does a linear search of the
> > memory blocks for every block id, with atomic ops at each step.
>
> With 4fb6eabf1037 ("drivers/base/memory.c: cache memory blocks in xarray
> to accelerate lookup") merged by Linus' today (strange, I thought this
> would be long upstream)
Ah, thanks for pointing this out! It was only posted to LKML so I missed it.
> all linear searches should be gone and at least
> the performance observation in this patch no longer applies.
The performance numbers as stated, that's certainly true, but this patch on top
still improves kernel boot by 7%. It's a savings of half a second -- I'll take
it.
IMHO the root cause of this is really the small block size. Building a cache
on top to avoid iterating over tons of small blocks seems like papering over
the problem, especially when one of the two affected paths in boot is a
cautious check that might be ready to be removed by now[0]:
static int init_memory_block(struct memory_block **memory,
unsigned long block_id, unsigned long state)
{
...
mem = find_memory_block_by_id(block_id);
if (mem) {
put_device(&mem->dev);
return -EEXIST;
}
Anyway, I guess I'll redo the changelog and post again.
> The memmap init should nowadays consume most time.
Yeah, but of course it's not as bad as it was now that it's fully parallelized.
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/a8e96df6-dc6d-037f-491c-92182d4ada8d@xxxxxxxxxx/
