linux/init/Kconfig

912 lines
28 KiB

[PATCH] uml: use DEFCONFIG_LIST to avoid reading host's config This should make sure that, for UML, host's configuration files are not considered, which avoids various pains to the user. Our dependency are such that the obtained Kconfig will be valid and will lead to successful compilation - however they cannot prevent an user from disabling any boot device, and if an option is not set in the read .config (say /boot/config-XXX), with make menuconfig ARCH=um, it is not set. This always disables UBD and all console I/O channels, which leads to non-working UML kernels, so this bothers users - especially now, since it will happen on almost every machine (/boot/config-`uname -r` exists almost on every machine). It can be workarounded with make defconfig ARCH=um, but it is non-obvious and can be avoided, so please _do_ merge this patch. Given the existence of options, it could be interesting to implement (additionally) "option required" - with it, Kconfig will refuse reading a .config file (from wherever it comes) if the given option is not set. With this, one could mark with it the option characteristic of the given architecture (it was an old proposal of Roman Zippel, when I pointed out our problem): config UML option required default y However this should be further discussed: *) for x86, it must support constructs like: ==arch/i386/Kconfig== config 64BIT option required default n where Kconfig must require that CONFIG_64BIT is disabled or not present in the read .config. *) do we want to do such checks only for the starting defconfig or also for .config? Which leads to: *) I may want to port a x86_64 .config to x86 and viceversa, or even among more different archs. Should that be allowed, and in which measure (the user may force skipping the check for a .config or it is only given a warning by default)? Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org> Cc: <kbuild-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> Signed-off-by: Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso <blaisorblade@yahoo.it> Cc: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-10-19 23:28:23 -07:00
[PATCH] BLOCK: Make it possible to disable the block layer [try #6] Make it possible to disable the block layer. Not all embedded devices require it, some can make do with just JFFS2, NFS, ramfs, etc - none of which require the block layer to be present. This patch does the following: (*) Introduces CONFIG_BLOCK to disable the block layer, buffering and blockdev support. (*) Adds dependencies on CONFIG_BLOCK to any configuration item that controls an item that uses the block layer. This includes: (*) Block I/O tracing. (*) Disk partition code. (*) All filesystems that are block based, eg: Ext3, ReiserFS, ISOFS. (*) The SCSI layer. As far as I can tell, even SCSI chardevs use the block layer to do scheduling. Some drivers that use SCSI facilities - such as USB storage - end up disabled indirectly from this. (*) Various block-based device drivers, such as IDE and the old CDROM drivers. (*) MTD blockdev handling and FTL. (*) JFFS - which uses set_bdev_super(), something it could avoid doing by taking a leaf out of JFFS2's book. (*) Makes most of the contents of linux/blkdev.h, linux/buffer_head.h and linux/elevator.h contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK being set. sector_div() is, however, still used in places, and so is still available. (*) Also made contingent are the contents of linux/mpage.h, linux/genhd.h and parts of linux/fs.h. (*) Makes a number of files in fs/ contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) Makes mm/bounce.c (bounce buffering) contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) set_page_dirty() doesn't call __set_page_dirty_buffers() if CONFIG_BLOCK is not enabled. (*) fs/no-block.c is created to hold out-of-line stubs and things that are required when CONFIG_BLOCK is not set: (*) Default blockdev file operations (to give error ENODEV on opening). (*) Makes some /proc changes: (*) /proc/devices does not list any blockdevs. (*) /proc/diskstats and /proc/partitions are contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) Makes some compat ioctl handling contingent on CONFIG_BLOCK. (*) If CONFIG_BLOCK is not defined, makes sys_quotactl() return -ENODEV if given command other than Q_SYNC or if a special device is specified. (*) In init/do_mounts.c, no reference is made to the blockdev routines if CONFIG_BLOCK is not defined. This does not prohibit NFS roots or JFFS2. (*) The bdflush, ioprio_set and ioprio_get syscalls can now be absent (return error ENOSYS by way of cond_syscall if so). (*) The seclvl_bd_claim() and seclvl_bd_release() security calls do nothing if CONFIG_BLOCK is not set, since they can't then happen. Signed-Off-By: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2006-09-30 20:45:40 +02:00
Task Control Groups: basic task cgroup framework Generic Process Control Groups -------------------------- There have recently been various proposals floating around for resource management/accounting and other task grouping subsystems in the kernel, including ResGroups, User BeanCounters, NSProxy cgroups, and others. These all need the basic abstraction of being able to group together multiple processes in an aggregate, in order to track/limit the resources permitted to those processes, or control other behaviour of the processes, and all implement this grouping in different ways. This patchset provides a framework for tracking and grouping processes into arbitrary "cgroups" and assigning arbitrary state to those groupings, in order to control the behaviour of the cgroup as an aggregate. The intention is that the various resource management and virtualization/cgroup efforts can also become task cgroup clients, with the result that: - the userspace APIs are (somewhat) normalised - it's easier to test e.g. the ResGroups CPU controller in conjunction with the BeanCounters memory controller, or use either of them as the resource-control portion of a virtual server system. - the additional kernel footprint of any of the competing resource management systems is substantially reduced, since it doesn't need to provide process grouping/containment, hence improving their chances of getting into the kernel This patch: Add the main task cgroups framework - the cgroup filesystem, and the basic structures for tracking membership and associating subsystem state objects to tasks. Signed-off-by: Paul Menage <menage@google.com> Cc: Serge E. Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com> Cc: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com> Cc: Kirill Korotaev <dev@openvz.org> Cc: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at> Cc: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@in.ibm.com> Cc: Cedric Le Goater <clg@fr.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-10-18 23:39:30 -07:00
cgroups: implement device whitelist Implement a cgroup to track and enforce open and mknod restrictions on device files. A device cgroup associates a device access whitelist with each cgroup. A whitelist entry has 4 fields. 'type' is a (all), c (char), or b (block). 'all' means it applies to all types and all major and minor numbers. Major and minor are either an integer or * for all. Access is a composition of r (read), w (write), and m (mknod). The root device cgroup starts with rwm to 'all'. A child devcg gets a copy of the parent. Admins can then remove devices from the whitelist or add new entries. A child cgroup can never receive a device access which is denied its parent. However when a device access is removed from a parent it will not also be removed from the child(ren). An entry is added using devices.allow, and removed using devices.deny. For instance echo 'c 1:3 mr' > /cgroups/1/devices.allow allows cgroup 1 to read and mknod the device usually known as /dev/null. Doing echo a > /cgroups/1/devices.deny will remove the default 'a *:* mrw' entry. CAP_SYS_ADMIN is needed to change permissions or move another task to a new cgroup. A cgroup may not be granted more permissions than the cgroup's parent has. Any task can move itself between cgroups. This won't be sufficient, but we can decide the best way to adequately restrict movement later. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix may-be-used-uninitialized warning] Signed-off-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com> Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org> Looks-good-to: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org> Cc: Daniel Hokka Zakrisson <daniel@hozac.com> Cc: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com> Cc: Paul Menage <menage@google.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com> Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-04-29 01:00:10 -07:00
sched: cpu accounting controller (V2) Commit cfb5285660aad4931b2ebbfa902ea48a37dfffa1 removed a useful feature for us, which provided a cpu accounting resource controller. This feature would be useful if someone wants to group tasks only for accounting purpose and doesnt really want to exercise any control over their cpu consumption. The patch below reintroduces the feature. It is based on Paul Menage's original patch (Commit 62d0df64065e7c135d0002f069444fbdfc64768f), with these differences: - Removed load average information. I felt it needs more thought (esp to deal with SMP and virtualized platforms) and can be added for 2.6.25 after more discussions. - Convert group cpu usage to be nanosecond accurate (as rest of the cfs stats are) and invoke cpuacct_charge() from the respective scheduler classes - Make accounting scalable on SMP systems by splitting the usage counter to be per-cpu - Move the code from kernel/cpu_acct.c to kernel/sched.c (since the code is not big enough to warrant a new file and also this rightly needs to live inside the scheduler. Also things like accessing rq->lock while reading cpu usage becomes easier if the code lived in kernel/sched.c) The patch also modifies the cpu controller not to provide the same accounting information. Tested-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Tested the patches on top of 2.6.24-rc3. The patches work fine. Ran some simple tests like cpuspin (spin on the cpu), ran several tasks in the same group and timed them. Compared their time stamps with cpuacct.usage. Signed-off-by: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
2007-12-02 20:04:49 +01:00
cgroups: add an owner to the mm_struct Remove the mem_cgroup member from mm_struct and instead adds an owner. This approach was suggested by Paul Menage. The advantage of this approach is that, once the mm->owner is known, using the subsystem id, the cgroup can be determined. It also allows several control groups that are virtually grouped by mm_struct, to exist independent of the memory controller i.e., without adding mem_cgroup's for each controller, to mm_struct. A new config option CONFIG_MM_OWNER is added and the memory resource controller selects this config option. This patch also adds cgroup callbacks to notify subsystems when mm->owner changes. The mm_cgroup_changed callback is called with the task_lock() of the new task held and is called just prior to changing the mm->owner. I am indebted to Paul Menage for the several reviews of this patchset and helping me make it lighter and simpler. This patch was tested on a powerpc box, it was compiled with both the MM_OWNER config turned on and off. After the thread group leader exits, it's moved to init_css_state by cgroup_exit(), thus all future charges from runnings threads would be redirected to the init_css_set's subsystem. Signed-off-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Pavel Emelianov <xemul@openvz.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: Sudhir Kumar <skumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: YAMAMOTO Takashi <yamamoto@valinux.co.jp> Cc: Hirokazu Takahashi <taka@valinux.co.jp> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>, Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> Reviewed-by: Paul Menage <menage@google.com> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-04-29 01:00:16 -07:00
cgroups: add an owner to the mm_struct Remove the mem_cgroup member from mm_struct and instead adds an owner. This approach was suggested by Paul Menage. The advantage of this approach is that, once the mm->owner is known, using the subsystem id, the cgroup can be determined. It also allows several control groups that are virtually grouped by mm_struct, to exist independent of the memory controller i.e., without adding mem_cgroup's for each controller, to mm_struct. A new config option CONFIG_MM_OWNER is added and the memory resource controller selects this config option. This patch also adds cgroup callbacks to notify subsystems when mm->owner changes. The mm_cgroup_changed callback is called with the task_lock() of the new task held and is called just prior to changing the mm->owner. I am indebted to Paul Menage for the several reviews of this patchset and helping me make it lighter and simpler. This patch was tested on a powerpc box, it was compiled with both the MM_OWNER config turned on and off. After the thread group leader exits, it's moved to init_css_state by cgroup_exit(), thus all future charges from runnings threads would be redirected to the init_css_set's subsystem. Signed-off-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Pavel Emelianov <xemul@openvz.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: Sudhir Kumar <skumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: YAMAMOTO Takashi <yamamoto@valinux.co.jp> Cc: Hirokazu Takahashi <taka@valinux.co.jp> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>, Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> Reviewed-by: Paul Menage <menage@google.com> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-04-29 01:00:16 -07:00
cgroups: add an owner to the mm_struct Remove the mem_cgroup member from mm_struct and instead adds an owner. This approach was suggested by Paul Menage. The advantage of this approach is that, once the mm->owner is known, using the subsystem id, the cgroup can be determined. It also allows several control groups that are virtually grouped by mm_struct, to exist independent of the memory controller i.e., without adding mem_cgroup's for each controller, to mm_struct. A new config option CONFIG_MM_OWNER is added and the memory resource controller selects this config option. This patch also adds cgroup callbacks to notify subsystems when mm->owner changes. The mm_cgroup_changed callback is called with the task_lock() of the new task held and is called just prior to changing the mm->owner. I am indebted to Paul Menage for the several reviews of this patchset and helping me make it lighter and simpler. This patch was tested on a powerpc box, it was compiled with both the MM_OWNER config turned on and off. After the thread group leader exits, it's moved to init_css_state by cgroup_exit(), thus all future charges from runnings threads would be redirected to the init_css_set's subsystem. Signed-off-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Pavel Emelianov <xemul@openvz.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: Sudhir Kumar <skumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: YAMAMOTO Takashi <yamamoto@valinux.co.jp> Cc: Hirokazu Takahashi <taka@valinux.co.jp> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>, Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi> Reviewed-by: Paul Menage <menage@google.com> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-04-29 01:00:16 -07:00
namespaces: move the IPC namespace under IPC_NS option Currently the IPC namespace management code is spread over the ipc/*.c files. I moved this code into ipc/namespace.c file which is compiled out when needed. The linux/ipc_namespace.h file is used to store the prototypes of the functions in namespace.c and the stubs for NAMESPACES=n case. This is done so, because the stub for copy_ipc_namespace requires the knowledge of the CLONE_NEWIPC flag, which is in sched.h. But the linux/ipc.h file itself in included into many many .c files via the sys.h->sem.h sequence so adding the sched.h into it will make all these .c depend on sched.h which is not that good. On the other hand the knowledge about the namespaces stuff is required in 4 .c files only. Besides, this patch compiles out some auxiliary functions from ipc/sem.c, msg.c and shm.c files. It turned out that moving these functions into namespaces.c is not that easy because they use many other calls and macros from the original file. Moving them would make this patch complicated. On the other hand all these functions can be consolidated, so I will send a separate patch doing this a bit later. Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org> Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com> Cc: Cedric Le Goater <clg@fr.ibm.com> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at> Cc: Kirill Korotaev <dev@sw.ru> Cc: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@us.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2008-02-08 04:18:22 -08:00
[PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl The basic issue is that despite have been deprecated and warned about as a very bad thing in the man pages since its inception there are a few real users of sys_sysctl. It was my assumption that because sysctl had been deprecated for all of 2.6 there would be no user space users by this point, so I initially gave sys_sysctl a very short deprecation period. Now that I know there are a few real users the only sane way to proceed with deprecation is to push the time limit out to a year or two work and work with distributions that have big testing pools like fedora core to find these last remaining users. Which means that the sys_sysctl interface needs to be maintained in the meantime. Since I have provided a technical measure that allows us to add new sysctl entries without reserving more binary numbers I believe that is enough to fix the sys_sysctl binary interface maintenance problems, because there is no longer a need to change the binary interface at all. Since the sys_sysctl implementation needs to stay around for a while and the worst of the maintenance issues that caused us to occasionally break the ABI have been addressed I don't see any advantage in continuing with the removal of sys_sysctl. So instead of merely increasing the deprecation period this patch removes the deprecation of sys_sysctl and modifies the kernel to compile the code in by default. With committing to maintain sys_sysctl we get all of the advantages of a fast interface for anything that needs it. Currently sys_sysctl is about 5x faster than /proc/sys, for the same string data. Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-11-08 17:44:51 -08:00
[PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl The basic issue is that despite have been deprecated and warned about as a very bad thing in the man pages since its inception there are a few real users of sys_sysctl. It was my assumption that because sysctl had been deprecated for all of 2.6 there would be no user space users by this point, so I initially gave sys_sysctl a very short deprecation period. Now that I know there are a few real users the only sane way to proceed with deprecation is to push the time limit out to a year or two work and work with distributions that have big testing pools like fedora core to find these last remaining users. Which means that the sys_sysctl interface needs to be maintained in the meantime. Since I have provided a technical measure that allows us to add new sysctl entries without reserving more binary numbers I believe that is enough to fix the sys_sysctl binary interface maintenance problems, because there is no longer a need to change the binary interface at all. Since the sys_sysctl implementation needs to stay around for a while and the worst of the maintenance issues that caused us to occasionally break the ABI have been addressed I don't see any advantage in continuing with the removal of sys_sysctl. So instead of merely increasing the deprecation period this patch removes the deprecation of sys_sysctl and modifies the kernel to compile the code in by default. With committing to maintain sys_sysctl we get all of the advantages of a fast interface for anything that needs it. Currently sys_sysctl is about 5x faster than /proc/sys, for the same string data. Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-11-08 17:44:51 -08:00
[PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl The basic issue is that despite have been deprecated and warned about as a very bad thing in the man pages since its inception there are a few real users of sys_sysctl. It was my assumption that because sysctl had been deprecated for all of 2.6 there would be no user space users by this point, so I initially gave sys_sysctl a very short deprecation period. Now that I know there are a few real users the only sane way to proceed with deprecation is to push the time limit out to a year or two work and work with distributions that have big testing pools like fedora core to find these last remaining users. Which means that the sys_sysctl interface needs to be maintained in the meantime. Since I have provided a technical measure that allows us to add new sysctl entries without reserving more binary numbers I believe that is enough to fix the sys_sysctl binary interface maintenance problems, because there is no longer a need to change the binary interface at all. Since the sys_sysctl implementation needs to stay around for a while and the worst of the maintenance issues that caused us to occasionally break the ABI have been addressed I don't see any advantage in continuing with the removal of sys_sysctl. So instead of merely increasing the deprecation period this patch removes the deprecation of sys_sysctl and modifies the kernel to compile the code in by default. With committing to maintain sys_sysctl we get all of the advantages of a fast interface for anything that needs it. Currently sys_sysctl is about 5x faster than /proc/sys, for the same string data. Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-11-08 17:44:51 -08:00
[PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl The basic issue is that despite have been deprecated and warned about as a very bad thing in the man pages since its inception there are a few real users of sys_sysctl. It was my assumption that because sysctl had been deprecated for all of 2.6 there would be no user space users by this point, so I initially gave sys_sysctl a very short deprecation period. Now that I know there are a few real users the only sane way to proceed with deprecation is to push the time limit out to a year or two work and work with distributions that have big testing pools like fedora core to find these last remaining users. Which means that the sys_sysctl interface needs to be maintained in the meantime. Since I have provided a technical measure that allows us to add new sysctl entries without reserving more binary numbers I believe that is enough to fix the sys_sysctl binary interface maintenance problems, because there is no longer a need to change the binary interface at all. Since the sys_sysctl implementation needs to stay around for a while and the worst of the maintenance issues that caused us to occasionally break the ABI have been addressed I don't see any advantage in continuing with the removal of sys_sysctl. So instead of merely increasing the deprecation period this patch removes the deprecation of sys_sysctl and modifies the kernel to compile the code in by default. With committing to maintain sys_sysctl we get all of the advantages of a fast interface for anything that needs it. Currently sys_sysctl is about 5x faster than /proc/sys, for the same string data. Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-11-08 17:44:51 -08:00
signal/timer/event: signalfd core This patch series implements the new signalfd() system call. I took part of the original Linus code (and you know how badly it can be broken :), and I added even more breakage ;) Signals are fetched from the same signal queue used by the process, so signalfd will compete with standard kernel delivery in dequeue_signal(). If you want to reliably fetch signals on the signalfd file, you need to block them with sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK). This seems to be working fine on my Dual Opteron machine. I made a quick test program for it: http://www.xmailserver.org/signafd-test.c The signalfd() system call implements signal delivery into a file descriptor receiver. The signalfd file descriptor if created with the following API: int signalfd(int ufd, const sigset_t *mask, size_t masksize); The "ufd" parameter allows to change an existing signalfd sigmask, w/out going to close/create cycle (Linus idea). Use "ufd" == -1 if you want a brand new signalfd file. The "mask" allows to specify the signal mask of signals that we are interested in. The "masksize" parameter is the size of "mask". The signalfd fd supports the poll(2) and read(2) system calls. The poll(2) will return POLLIN when signals are available to be dequeued. As a direct consequence of supporting the Linux poll subsystem, the signalfd fd can use used together with epoll(2) too. The read(2) system call will return a "struct signalfd_siginfo" structure in the userspace supplied buffer. The return value is the number of bytes copied in the supplied buffer, or -1 in case of error. The read(2) call can also return 0, in case the sighand structure to which the signalfd was attached, has been orphaned. The O_NONBLOCK flag is also supported, and read(2) will return -EAGAIN in case no signal is available. If the size of the buffer passed to read(2) is lower than sizeof(struct signalfd_siginfo), -EINVAL is returned. A read from the signalfd can also return -ERESTARTSYS in case a signal hits the process. The format of the struct signalfd_siginfo is, and the valid fields depends of the (->code & __SI_MASK) value, in the same way a struct siginfo would: struct signalfd_siginfo { __u32 signo; /* si_signo */ __s32 err; /* si_errno */ __s32 code; /* si_code */ __u32 pid; /* si_pid */ __u32 uid; /* si_uid */ __s32 fd; /* si_fd */ __u32 tid; /* si_fd */ __u32 band; /* si_band */ __u32 overrun; /* si_overrun */ __u32 trapno; /* si_trapno */ __s32 status; /* si_status */ __s32 svint; /* si_int */ __u64 svptr; /* si_ptr */ __u64 utime; /* si_utime */ __u64 stime; /* si_stime */ __u64 addr; /* si_addr */ }; [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix signalfd_copyinfo() on i386] Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-10 22:23:13 -07:00
signal/timer/event: signalfd core This patch series implements the new signalfd() system call. I took part of the original Linus code (and you know how badly it can be broken :), and I added even more breakage ;) Signals are fetched from the same signal queue used by the process, so signalfd will compete with standard kernel delivery in dequeue_signal(). If you want to reliably fetch signals on the signalfd file, you need to block them with sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK). This seems to be working fine on my Dual Opteron machine. I made a quick test program for it: http://www.xmailserver.org/signafd-test.c The signalfd() system call implements signal delivery into a file descriptor receiver. The signalfd file descriptor if created with the following API: int signalfd(int ufd, const sigset_t *mask, size_t masksize); The "ufd" parameter allows to change an existing signalfd sigmask, w/out going to close/create cycle (Linus idea). Use "ufd" == -1 if you want a brand new signalfd file. The "mask" allows to specify the signal mask of signals that we are interested in. The "masksize" parameter is the size of "mask". The signalfd fd supports the poll(2) and read(2) system calls. The poll(2) will return POLLIN when signals are available to be dequeued. As a direct consequence of supporting the Linux poll subsystem, the signalfd fd can use used together with epoll(2) too. The read(2) system call will return a "struct signalfd_siginfo" structure in the userspace supplied buffer. The return value is the number of bytes copied in the supplied buffer, or -1 in case of error. The read(2) call can also return 0, in case the sighand structure to which the signalfd was attached, has been orphaned. The O_NONBLOCK flag is also supported, and read(2) will return -EAGAIN in case no signal is available. If the size of the buffer passed to read(2) is lower than sizeof(struct signalfd_siginfo), -EINVAL is returned. A read from the signalfd can also return -ERESTARTSYS in case a signal hits the process. The format of the struct signalfd_siginfo is, and the valid fields depends of the (->code & __SI_MASK) value, in the same way a struct siginfo would: struct signalfd_siginfo { __u32 signo; /* si_signo */ __s32 err; /* si_errno */ __s32 code; /* si_code */ __u32 pid; /* si_pid */ __u32 uid; /* si_uid */ __s32 fd; /* si_fd */ __u32 tid; /* si_fd */ __u32 band; /* si_band */ __u32 overrun; /* si_overrun */ __u32 trapno; /* si_trapno */ __s32 status; /* si_status */ __s32 svint; /* si_int */ __u64 svptr; /* si_ptr */ __u64 utime; /* si_utime */ __u64 stime; /* si_stime */ __u64 addr; /* si_addr */ }; [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix signalfd_copyinfo() on i386] Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-10 22:23:13 -07:00
signal/timer/event: timerfd core This patch introduces a new system call for timers events delivered though file descriptors. This allows timer event to be used with standard POSIX poll(2), select(2) and read(2). As a consequence of supporting the Linux f_op->poll subsystem, they can be used with epoll(2) too. The system call is defined as: int timerfd(int ufd, int clockid, int flags, const struct itimerspec *utmr); The "ufd" parameter allows for re-use (re-programming) of an existing timerfd w/out going through the close/open cycle (same as signalfd). If "ufd" is -1, s new file descriptor will be created, otherwise the existing "ufd" will be re-programmed. The "clockid" parameter is either CLOCK_MONOTONIC or CLOCK_REALTIME. The time specified in the "utmr->it_value" parameter is the expiry time for the timer. If the TFD_TIMER_ABSTIME flag is set in "flags", this is an absolute time, otherwise it's a relative time. If the time specified in the "utmr->it_interval" is not zero (.tv_sec == 0, tv_nsec == 0), this is the period at which the following ticks should be generated. The "utmr->it_interval" should be set to zero if only one tick is requested. Setting the "utmr->it_value" to zero will disable the timer, or will create a timerfd without the timer enabled. The function returns the new (or same, in case "ufd" is a valid timerfd descriptor) file, or -1 in case of error. As stated before, the timerfd file descriptor supports poll(2), select(2) and epoll(2). When a timer event happened on the timerfd, a POLLIN mask will be returned. The read(2) call can be used, and it will return a u32 variable holding the number of "ticks" that happened on the interface since the last call to read(2). The read(2) call supportes the O_NONBLOCK flag too, and EAGAIN will be returned if no ticks happened. A quick test program, shows timerfd working correctly on my amd64 box: http://www.xmailserver.org/timerfd-test.c [akpm@linux-foundation.org: add sys_timerfd to sys_ni.c] Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-10 22:23:16 -07:00
signal/timer/event: timerfd core This patch introduces a new system call for timers events delivered though file descriptors. This allows timer event to be used with standard POSIX poll(2), select(2) and read(2). As a consequence of supporting the Linux f_op->poll subsystem, they can be used with epoll(2) too. The system call is defined as: int timerfd(int ufd, int clockid, int flags, const struct itimerspec *utmr); The "ufd" parameter allows for re-use (re-programming) of an existing timerfd w/out going through the close/open cycle (same as signalfd). If "ufd" is -1, s new file descriptor will be created, otherwise the existing "ufd" will be re-programmed. The "clockid" parameter is either CLOCK_MONOTONIC or CLOCK_REALTIME. The time specified in the "utmr->it_value" parameter is the expiry time for the timer. If the TFD_TIMER_ABSTIME flag is set in "flags", this is an absolute time, otherwise it's a relative time. If the time specified in the "utmr->it_interval" is not zero (.tv_sec == 0, tv_nsec == 0), this is the period at which the following ticks should be generated. The "utmr->it_interval" should be set to zero if only one tick is requested. Setting the "utmr->it_value" to zero will disable the timer, or will create a timerfd without the timer enabled. The function returns the new (or same, in case "ufd" is a valid timerfd descriptor) file, or -1 in case of error. As stated before, the timerfd file descriptor supports poll(2), select(2) and epoll(2). When a timer event happened on the timerfd, a POLLIN mask will be returned. The read(2) call can be used, and it will return a u32 variable holding the number of "ticks" that happened on the interface since the last call to read(2). The read(2) call supportes the O_NONBLOCK flag too, and EAGAIN will be returned if no ticks happened. A quick test program, shows timerfd working correctly on my amd64 box: http://www.xmailserver.org/timerfd-test.c [akpm@linux-foundation.org: add sys_timerfd to sys_ni.c] Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-10 22:23:16 -07:00
signal/timer/event: eventfd core This is a very simple and light file descriptor, that can be used as event wait/dispatch by userspace (both wait and dispatch) and by the kernel (dispatch only). It can be used instead of pipe(2) in all cases where those would simply be used to signal events. Their kernel overhead is much lower than pipes, and they do not consume two fds. When used in the kernel, it can offer an fd-bridge to enable, for example, functionalities like KAIO or syslets/threadlets to signal to an fd the completion of certain operations. But more in general, an eventfd can be used by the kernel to signal readiness, in a POSIX poll/select way, of interfaces that would otherwise be incompatible with it. The API is: int eventfd(unsigned int count); The eventfd API accepts an initial "count" parameter, and returns an eventfd fd. It supports poll(2) (POLLIN, POLLOUT, POLLERR), read(2) and write(2). The POLLIN flag is raised when the internal counter is greater than zero. The POLLOUT flag is raised when at least a value of "1" can be written to the internal counter. The POLLERR flag is raised when an overflow in the counter value is detected. The write(2) operation can never overflow the counter, since it blocks (unless O_NONBLOCK is set, in which case -EAGAIN is returned). But the eventfd_signal() function can do it, since it's supposed to not sleep during its operation. The read(2) function reads the __u64 counter value, and reset the internal value to zero. If the value read is equal to (__u64) -1, an overflow happened on the internal counter (due to 2^64 eventfd_signal() posts that has never been retired - unlickely, but possible). The write(2) call writes an __u64 count value, and adds it to the current counter. The eventfd fd supports O_NONBLOCK also. On the kernel side, we have: struct file *eventfd_fget(int fd); int eventfd_signal(struct file *file, unsigned int n); The eventfd_fget() should be called to get a struct file* from an eventfd fd (this is an fget() + check of f_op being an eventfd fops pointer). The kernel can then call eventfd_signal() every time it wants to post an event to userspace. The eventfd_signal() function can be called from any context. An eventfd() simple test and bench is available here: http://www.xmailserver.org/eventfd-bench.c This is the eventfd-based version of pipetest-4 (pipe(2) based): http://www.xmailserver.org/pipetest-4.c Not that performance matters much in the eventfd case, but eventfd-bench shows almost as double as performance than pipetest-4. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix i386 build] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: add sys_eventfd to sys_ni.c] Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-10 22:23:19 -07:00
signal/timer/event: eventfd core This is a very simple and light file descriptor, that can be used as event wait/dispatch by userspace (both wait and dispatch) and by the kernel (dispatch only). It can be used instead of pipe(2) in all cases where those would simply be used to signal events. Their kernel overhead is much lower than pipes, and they do not consume two fds. When used in the kernel, it can offer an fd-bridge to enable, for example, functionalities like KAIO or syslets/threadlets to signal to an fd the completion of certain operations. But more in general, an eventfd can be used by the kernel to signal readiness, in a POSIX poll/select way, of interfaces that would otherwise be incompatible with it. The API is: int eventfd(unsigned int count); The eventfd API accepts an initial "count" parameter, and returns an eventfd fd. It supports poll(2) (POLLIN, POLLOUT, POLLERR), read(2) and write(2). The POLLIN flag is raised when the internal counter is greater than zero. The POLLOUT flag is raised when at least a value of "1" can be written to the internal counter. The POLLERR flag is raised when an overflow in the counter value is detected. The write(2) operation can never overflow the counter, since it blocks (unless O_NONBLOCK is set, in which case -EAGAIN is returned). But the eventfd_signal() function can do it, since it's supposed to not sleep during its operation. The read(2) function reads the __u64 counter value, and reset the internal value to zero. If the value read is equal to (__u64) -1, an overflow happened on the internal counter (due to 2^64 eventfd_signal() posts that has never been retired - unlickely, but possible). The write(2) call writes an __u64 count value, and adds it to the current counter. The eventfd fd supports O_NONBLOCK also. On the kernel side, we have: struct file *eventfd_fget(int fd); int eventfd_signal(struct file *file, unsigned int n); The eventfd_fget() should be called to get a struct file* from an eventfd fd (this is an fget() + check of f_op being an eventfd fops pointer). The kernel can then call eventfd_signal() every time it wants to post an event to userspace. The eventfd_signal() function can be called from any context. An eventfd() simple test and bench is available here: http://www.xmailserver.org/eventfd-bench.c This is the eventfd-based version of pipetest-4 (pipe(2) based): http://www.xmailserver.org/pipetest-4.c Not that performance matters much in the eventfd case, but eventfd-bench shows almost as double as performance than pipetest-4. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix i386 build] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: add sys_eventfd to sys_ni.c] Signed-off-by: Davide Libenzi <davidel@xmailserver.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-10 22:23:19 -07:00
[PATCH] Light weight event counters The remaining counters in page_state after the zoned VM counter patches have been applied are all just for show in /proc/vmstat. They have no essential function for the VM. We use a simple increment of per cpu variables. In order to avoid the most severe races we disable preempt. Preempt does not prevent the race between an increment and an interrupt handler incrementing the same statistics counter. However, that race is exceedingly rare, we may only loose one increment or so and there is no requirement (at least not in kernel) that the vm event counters have to be accurate. In the non preempt case this results in a simple increment for each counter. For many architectures this will be reduced by the compiler to a single instruction. This single instruction is atomic for i386 and x86_64. And therefore even the rare race condition in an interrupt is avoided for both architectures in most cases. The patchset also adds an off switch for embedded systems that allows a building of linux kernels without these counters. The implementation of these counters is through inline code that hopefully results in only a single instruction increment instruction being emitted (i386, x86_64) or in the increment being hidden though instruction concurrency (EPIC architectures such as ia64 can get that done). Benefits: - VM event counter operations usually reduce to a single inline instruction on i386 and x86_64. - No interrupt disable, only preempt disable for the preempt case. Preempt disable can also be avoided by moving the counter into a spinlock. - Handling is similar to zoned VM counters. - Simple and easily extendable. - Can be omitted to reduce memory use for embedded use. References: RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113512330605497&w=2 RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114988082814934&w=2 local_t http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114991748606690&w=2 V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115014808400007&r=1&w=2 V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767022346&w=2 V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115047968808926&w=2 Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-06-30 01:55:45 -07:00
[PATCH] Light weight event counters The remaining counters in page_state after the zoned VM counter patches have been applied are all just for show in /proc/vmstat. They have no essential function for the VM. We use a simple increment of per cpu variables. In order to avoid the most severe races we disable preempt. Preempt does not prevent the race between an increment and an interrupt handler incrementing the same statistics counter. However, that race is exceedingly rare, we may only loose one increment or so and there is no requirement (at least not in kernel) that the vm event counters have to be accurate. In the non preempt case this results in a simple increment for each counter. For many architectures this will be reduced by the compiler to a single instruction. This single instruction is atomic for i386 and x86_64. And therefore even the rare race condition in an interrupt is avoided for both architectures in most cases. The patchset also adds an off switch for embedded systems that allows a building of linux kernels without these counters. The implementation of these counters is through inline code that hopefully results in only a single instruction increment instruction being emitted (i386, x86_64) or in the increment being hidden though instruction concurrency (EPIC architectures such as ia64 can get that done). Benefits: - VM event counter operations usually reduce to a single inline instruction on i386 and x86_64. - No interrupt disable, only preempt disable for the preempt case. Preempt disable can also be avoided by moving the counter into a spinlock. - Handling is similar to zoned VM counters. - Simple and easily extendable. - Can be omitted to reduce memory use for embedded use. References: RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=113512330605497&w=2 RFC http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114988082814934&w=2 local_t http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=114991748606690&w=2 V2 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=115014808400007&r=1&w=2 V3 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115024767022346&w=2 V4 http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115047968808926&w=2 Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-06-30 01:55:45 -07:00
SLUB core This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-06 14:49:36 -07:00
SLUB core This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-06 14:49:36 -07:00
SLUB core This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-06 14:49:36 -07:00
SLUB core This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-06 14:49:36 -07:00
SLUB core This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-06 14:49:36 -07:00
SLUB core This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-06 14:49:36 -07:00
SLUB core This is a new slab allocator which was motivated by the complexity of the existing code in mm/slab.c. It attempts to address a variety of concerns with the existing implementation. A. Management of object queues A particular concern was the complex management of the numerous object queues in SLAB. SLUB has no such queues. Instead we dedicate a slab for each allocating CPU and use objects from a slab directly instead of queueing them up. B. Storage overhead of object queues SLAB Object queues exist per node, per CPU. The alien cache queue even has a queue array that contain a queue for each processor on each node. For very large systems the number of queues and the number of objects that may be caught in those queues grows exponentially. On our systems with 1k nodes / processors we have several gigabytes just tied up for storing references to objects for those queues This does not include the objects that could be on those queues. One fears that the whole memory of the machine could one day be consumed by those queues. C. SLAB meta data overhead SLAB has overhead at the beginning of each slab. This means that data cannot be naturally aligned at the beginning of a slab block. SLUB keeps all meta data in the corresponding page_struct. Objects can be naturally aligned in the slab. F.e. a 128 byte object will be aligned at 128 byte boundaries and can fit tightly into a 4k page with no bytes left over. SLAB cannot do this. D. SLAB has a complex cache reaper SLUB does not need a cache reaper for UP systems. On SMP systems the per CPU slab may be pushed back into partial list but that operation is simple and does not require an iteration over a list of objects. SLAB expires per CPU, shared and alien object queues during cache reaping which may cause strange hold offs. E. SLAB has complex NUMA policy layer support SLUB pushes NUMA policy handling into the page allocator. This means that allocation is coarser (SLUB does interleave on a page level) but that situation was also present before 2.6.13. SLABs application of policies to individual slab objects allocated in SLAB is certainly a performance concern due to the frequent references to memory policies which may lead a sequence of objects to come from one node after another. SLUB will get a slab full of objects from one node and then will switch to the next. F. Reduction of the size of partial slab lists SLAB has per node partial lists. This means that over time a large number of partial slabs may accumulate on those lists. These can only be reused if allocator occur on specific nodes. SLUB has a global pool of partial slabs and will consume slabs from that pool to decrease fragmentation. G. Tunables SLAB has sophisticated tuning abilities for each slab cache. One can manipulate the queue sizes in detail. However, filling the queues still requires the uses of the spin lock to check out slabs. SLUB has a global parameter (min_slab_order) for tuning. Increasing the minimum slab order can decrease the locking overhead. The bigger the slab order the less motions of pages between per CPU and partial lists occur and the better SLUB will be scaling. G. Slab merging We often have slab caches with similar parameters. SLUB detects those on boot up and merges them into the corresponding general caches. This leads to more effective memory use. About 50% of all caches can be eliminated through slab merging. This will also decrease slab fragmentation because partial allocated slabs can be filled up again. Slab merging can be switched off by specifying slub_nomerge on boot up. Note that merging can expose heretofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T,<slabcache> option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug=<options> Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=<o>,<cache> Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2007-05-06 14:49:36 -07:00
Create arch/Kconfig Puts the content of arch/Kconfig in the "General setup" menu. Linus: > Should it come with a re-duplication of it's content into each > architecture, which was the case previously ? The oprofile and kprobes > menu entries were litteraly cut and pasted from one architecture to > another. Should we put its content in init/Kconfig then ? I don't think it's a good idea to go back to making it per-architecture, although that extensive "depends on <list-of-archiectures-here>" might indicate that there certainly is room for cleanup there. And I don't think it's wrong keeping it in kernel/Kconfig.xyz per se, I just think it's wrong to (a) lump the code together when it really doesn't necessarily need to and (b) show it to users as some kind of choice that is tied together (whether it then has common code or not). On the per-architecture side, I do think it would be better to *not* have internal architecture knowledge in a generic file, and as such a line like depends on X86_32 || IA64 || PPC || S390 || SPARC64 || X86_64 || AVR32 really shouldn't exist in a file like kernel/Kconfig.instrumentation. It would be much better to do depends on ARCH_SUPPORTS_KPROBES in that generic file, and then architectures that do support it would just have a bool ARCH_SUPPORTS_KPROBES default y in *their* architecture files. That would seem to be much more logical, and is readable both for arch maintainers *and* for people who have no clue - and don't care - about which architecture is supposed to support which interface... Sam Ravnborg: Stuff it into a new file: arch/Kconfig We can then extend this file to include all the 'trailing' Kconfig things that are anyway equal for all ARCHs. But it should be kept clean - so if we introduce such a file then we should use ARCH_HAS_whatever in the arch specific Kconfig files to enable stuff that is not shared. [...] The above suggestion is actually not exactly the best way to do it... First the naming.. A quick grep shows following usage today (in Kconfig files) ARCH_HAS 51 ARCH_SUPPORTS 4 HAVE_ARCH 7 ARCH_HAS is the clear winner. In the common Kconfig file do: config FOO depends on ARCH_HAS_FOO bool "bla bla" config ARCH_HAS_FOO def_bool n In the arch specific Kconfig file in a suitable place do: config SUITABLE_OPTION select ARCH_HAS_FOO The naming of ARCH_HAS_ is fixed and shall be: ARCH_HAS_<config option it will enable> Only a single line added pr. architecture. And we will end up with a (maybe even commented) list of trivial selects. - Yet another update : Moving to HAVE_* now. Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca> Cc: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com> Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Cc: Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli <ananth@in.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
2008-02-02 15:10:33 -05:00