On 04/15/2015 09:38 AM, Mel Gorman wrote:
On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 09:15:50AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
<SNIP>
Patches are against 4.0-rc7.
Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt | 8 +
arch/ia64/mm/numa.c | 19 +-
arch/x86/Kconfig | 2 +
include/linux/memblock.h | 18 ++
include/linux/mm.h | 8 +-
include/linux/mmzone.h | 37 +++-
init/main.c | 1 +
mm/Kconfig | 29 +++
mm/bootmem.c | 6 +-
mm/internal.h | 23 ++-
mm/memblock.c | 34 ++-
mm/mm_init.c | 9 +-
mm/nobootmem.c | 7 +-
mm/page_alloc.c | 398 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----
mm/vmscan.c | 6 +-
15 files changed, 507 insertions(+), 98 deletions(-)
I had included your patch with the 4.0 kernel and booted up a
16-socket 12-TB machine. I measured the elapsed time from the elilo
prompt to the availability of ssh login. Without the patch, the
bootup time was 404s. It was reduced to 298s with the patch. So
there was about 100s reduction in bootup time (1/4 of the total).
Cool, thanks for testing. Would you be able to state if this is really
important or not? Does booting 100s second faster on a 12TB machine really
matter? I can then add that justification to the changelog to avoid a
conversation with Andrew that goes something like
Andrew: Why are we doing this?
Mel: Because we can and apparently people might want it.
Andrew: What's the maintenance cost of this?
Mel: Magic beans
I prefer talking to Andrew when it's harder to predict what he'll say.
Booting 100s faster is certainly something that is nice to have. Right
now, more time is spent in the firmware POST portion of the bootup
process than in the OS boot. So I would say this patch isn't really
critical right now as machines with that much memory are relatively
rare. However, if we look forward to the near future, some new memory
technology like persistent memory is coming and machines with large
amount of memory (whether persistent or not) will become more common.
This patch will certainly be useful if we look forward into the future.
However, there were 2 bootup problems in the dmesg log that needed
to be addressed.
1. There were 2 vmalloc allocation failures:
[ 2.284686] vmalloc: allocation failure, allocated 16578404352 of
17179873280 bytes
[ 10.399938] vmalloc: allocation failure, allocated 7970922496 of
8589938688 bytes
2. There were 2 soft lockup warnings:
[ 57.319453] NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 23s!
[swapper/0:1]
[ 85.409263] NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 22s!
[swapper/0:1]
Once those problems are fixed, the patch should be in a pretty good
shape. I have attached the dmesg log for your reference.
The obvious conclusion is that initialising 1G per node is not enough for
really large machines. Can you try this on top? It's untested but should
work. The low value was chosen because it happened to work and I wanted
to get test coverage on common hardware but broke is broke.
diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index f2c96d02662f..6b3bec304e35 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -276,9 +276,9 @@ static inline bool update_defer_init(pg_data_t *pgdat,
if (pgdat->first_deferred_pfn != ULONG_MAX)
return false;
- /* Initialise at least 1G per zone */
+ /* Initialise at least 32G per node */
(*nr_initialised)++;
- if (*nr_initialised> (1UL<< (30 - PAGE_SHIFT))&&
+ if (*nr_initialised> (32UL<< (30 - PAGE_SHIFT))&&
(pfn& (PAGES_PER_SECTION - 1)) == 0) {
pgdat->first_deferred_pfn = pfn;
return false;
I will try this out when I can get hold of the 12-TB machine again.
The vmalloc allocation failures were for the following hash tables:
- Dentry cache hash table entries
- Inode-cache hash table entries
Those hash tables scale linearly with the amount of memory available in
the system. So instead of hardcoding a certain value, why don't we make
it a certain % of the total memory but bottomed out to 1G at the low end?
Cheers,
Longman
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