On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 12:18:09PM +1100, David Chinner wrote: > On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 01:58:11PM +0100, Jesper Juhl wrote: > > > > Attached are two files. The one named stack_overflows.txt.gz contains > > one instance of each unique stack overflow + trace that I've got. The > > other file named kernel_BUG.txt.gz contains a few BUG() messages that > > were also in the logs. .... > I've just checked on a 2.6.17 build on i386 how much stack we > are using (from checkstack.pl with min size reported set to 32 bytes) > here in XFS: .... > So, assuming the stacks less than 32 bytes are 32 bytes, we've got > 1380 bytes in the XFS stack there, and very few functions where it > can be reduced further. Still, 1380 bytes is way, way short of 4KB, > so unless there is extra stack usage that checkstack doesn't tell us > about I'm not sure why this amount of usage is causing repeated > stack overflows with very little stack usage on either side of it. > > Can someone enlighten me as to where all the rest of the stack > is being used up here? FYI. With some help from Keith Owens, we've determined that gcc 3.3.5 resulted in XFS stack usage of about 1.9KB through the writeback and allocation path with another ~800 bytes of stack usage in generic code in this path. The big difference between the numbers I was getting from checkstack and reality was CONFIG_CC_OPTIMISE_FOR_SIZE=y being set on the kernels I was stack checking. IOWs, CONFIG_CC_OPTIMISE_FOR_SIZE=y appears to reduce XFS stack usage by at least 20% and so probably should be used with XFS on 4k stacks. Keith also confirmed that gcc-4.1's aggressive inlining of static functions substantially increases stack usage (by ~15%) through this call chain. Given that many of the inlined static functions are not required by the critical path (i.e. they'd previously been factored out to reduce stack usage), gcc is effectively undoing past mods that had substantially reduced XFS's stack usage. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner Principal Engineer SGI Australian Software Group - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
