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authorMel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>2018-12-28 00:35:41 -0800
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2018-12-28 12:11:48 -0800
commit6bb154504f8b496780ec53ec81aba957a12981fa (patch)
treedbed6f65d0ff903edb43788301f2969fa37d76df /mm/internal.h
parentf29d8e9c0191a2a02500945db505e5c89159c3f4 (diff)
mm, page_alloc: spread allocations across zones before introducing fragmentation
Patch series "Fragmentation avoidance improvements", v5. It has been noted before that fragmentation avoidance (aka anti-fragmentation) is not perfect. Given sufficient time or an adverse workload, memory gets fragmented and the long-term success of high-order allocations degrades. This series defines an adverse workload, a definition of external fragmentation events (including serious) ones and a series that reduces the level of those fragmentation events. The details of the workload and the consequences are described in more detail in the changelogs. However, from patch 1, this is a high-level summary of the adverse workload. The exact details are found in the mmtests implementation. The broad details of the workload are as follows; 1. Create an XFS filesystem (not specified in the configuration but done as part of the testing for this patch) 2. Start 4 fio threads that write a number of 64K files inefficiently. Inefficiently means that files are created on first access and not created in advance (fio parameterr create_on_open=1) and fallocate is not used (fallocate=none). With multiple IO issuers this creates a mix of slab and page cache allocations over time. The total size of the files is 150% physical memory so that the slabs and page cache pages get mixed 3. Warm up a number of fio read-only threads accessing the same files created in step 2. This part runs for the same length of time it took to create the files. It'll fault back in old data and further interleave slab and page cache allocations. As it's now low on memory due to step 2, fragmentation occurs as pageblocks get stolen. 4. While step 3 is still running, start a process that tries to allocate 75% of memory as huge pages with a number of threads. The number of threads is based on a (NR_CPUS_SOCKET - NR_FIO_THREADS)/4 to avoid THP threads contending with fio, any other threads or forcing cross-NUMA scheduling. Note that the test has not been used on a machine with less than 8 cores. The benchmark records whether huge pages were allocated and what the fault latency was in microseconds 5. Measure the number of events potentially causing external fragmentation, the fault latency and the huge page allocation success rate. 6. Cleanup Overall the series reduces external fragmentation causing events by over 94% on 1 and 2 socket machines, which in turn impacts high-order allocation success rates over the long term. There are differences in latencies and high-order allocation success rates. Latencies are a mixed bag as they are vulnerable to exact system state and whether allocations succeeded so they are treated as a secondary metric. Patch 1 uses lower zones if they are populated and have free memory instead of fragmenting a higher zone. It's special cased to handle a Normal->DMA32 fallback with the reasons explained in the changelog. Patch 2-4 boosts watermarks temporarily when an external fragmentation event occurs. kswapd wakes to reclaim a small amount of old memory and then wakes kcompactd on completion to recover the system slightly. This introduces some overhead in the slowpath. The level of boosting can be tuned or disabled depending on the tolerance for fragmentation vs allocation latency. Patch 5 stalls some movable allocation requests to let kswapd from patch 4 make some progress. The duration of the stalls is very low but it is possible to tune the system to avoid fragmentation events if larger stalls can be tolerated. The bulk of the improvement in fragmentation avoidance is from patches 1-4 but patch 5 can deal with a rare corner case and provides the option of tuning a system for THP allocation success rates in exchange for some stalls to control fragmentation. This patch (of 5): The page allocator zone lists are iterated based on the watermarks of each zone which does not take anti-fragmentation into account. On x86, node 0 may have multiple zones while other nodes have one zone. A consequence is that tasks running on node 0 may fragment ZONE_NORMAL even though ZONE_DMA32 has plenty of free memory. This patch special cases the allocator fast path such that it'll try an allocation from a lower local zone before fragmenting a higher zone. In this case, stealing of pageblocks or orders larger than a pageblock are still allowed in the fast path as they are uninteresting from a fragmentation point of view. This was evaluated using a benchmark designed to fragment memory before attempting THP allocations. It's implemented in mmtests as the following configurations configs/config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale configs/config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-defrag configs/config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-madvhugepage e.g. from mmtests ./run-mmtests.sh --run-monitor --config configs/config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale test-run-1 The broad details of the workload are as follows; 1. Create an XFS filesystem (not specified in the configuration but done as part of the testing for this patch). 2. Start 4 fio threads that write a number of 64K files inefficiently. Inefficiently means that files are created on first access and not created in advance (fio parameter create_on_open=1) and fallocate is not used (fallocate=none). With multiple IO issuers this creates a mix of slab and page cache allocations over time. The total size of the files is 150% physical memory so that the slabs and page cache pages get mixed. 3. Warm up a number of fio read-only processes accessing the same files created in step 2. This part runs for the same length of time it took to create the files. It'll refault old data and further interleave slab and page cache allocations. As it's now low on memory due to step 2, fragmentation occurs as pageblocks get stolen. 4. While step 3 is still running, start a process that tries to allocate 75% of memory as huge pages with a number of threads. The number of threads is based on a (NR_CPUS_SOCKET - NR_FIO_THREADS)/4 to avoid THP threads contending with fio, any other threads or forcing cross-NUMA scheduling. Note that the test has not been used on a machine with less than 8 cores. The benchmark records whether huge pages were allocated and what the fault latency was in microseconds. 5. Measure the number of events potentially causing external fragmentation, the fault latency and the huge page allocation success rate. 6. Cleanup the test files. Note that due to the use of IO and page cache that this benchmark is not suitable for running on large machines where the time to fragment memory may be excessive. Also note that while this is one mix that generates fragmentation that it's not the only mix that generates fragmentation. Differences in workload that are more slab-intensive or whether SLUB is used with high-order pages may yield different results. When the page allocator fragments memory, it records the event using the mm_page_alloc_extfrag ftrace event. If the fallback_order is smaller than a pageblock order (order-9 on 64-bit x86) then it's considered to be an "external fragmentation event" that may cause issues in the future. Hence, the primary metric here is the number of external fragmentation events that occur with order < 9. The secondary metric is allocation latency and huge page allocation success rates but note that differences in latencies and what the success rate also can affect the number of external fragmentation event which is why it's a secondary metric. 1-socket Skylake machine config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale XFS (no special madvise) 4 fio threads, 1 THP allocating thread -------------------------------------- 4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9: 804694 4.20-rc3+patch: 408912 (49% reduction) thpfioscale Fault Latencies 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Amean fault-base-1 662.92 ( 0.00%) 653.58 * 1.41%* Amean fault-huge-1 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Percentage huge-1 0.00 ( 0.00%) 0.00 ( 0.00%) Fault latencies are slightly reduced while allocation success rates remain at zero as this configuration does not make any special effort to allocate THP and fio is heavily active at the time and either filling memory or keeping pages resident. However, a 49% reduction of serious fragmentation events reduces the changes of external fragmentation being a problem in the future. Vlastimil asked during review for a breakdown of the allocation types that are falling back. vanilla 3816 MIGRATE_UNMOVABLE 800845 MIGRATE_MOVABLE 33 MIGRATE_UNRECLAIMABLE patch 735 MIGRATE_UNMOVABLE 408135 MIGRATE_MOVABLE 42 MIGRATE_UNRECLAIMABLE The majority of the fallbacks are due to movable allocations and this is consistent for the workload throughout the series so will not be presented again as the primary source of fallbacks are movable allocations. Movable fallbacks are sometimes considered "ok" to fallback because they can be migrated. The problem is that they can fill an unmovable/reclaimable pageblock causing those allocations to fallback later and polluting pageblocks with pages that cannot move. If there is a movable fallback, it is pretty much guaranteed to affect an unmovable/reclaimable pageblock and while it might not be enough to actually cause a unmovable/reclaimable fallback in the future, we cannot know that in advance so the patch takes the only option available to it. Hence, it's important to control them. This point is also consistent throughout the series and will not be repeated. 1-socket Skylake machine global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-madvhugepage-xfs (MADV_HUGEPAGE) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9: 291392 4.20-rc3+patch: 191187 (34% reduction) thpfioscale Fault Latencies 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Amean fault-base-1 1495.14 ( 0.00%) 1467.55 ( 1.85%) Amean fault-huge-1 1098.48 ( 0.00%) 1127.11 ( -2.61%) thpfioscale Percentage Faults Huge 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Percentage huge-1 78.57 ( 0.00%) 77.64 ( -1.18%) Fragmentation events were reduced quite a bit although this is known to be a little variable. The latencies and allocation success rates are similar but they were already quite high. 2-socket Haswell machine config-global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale XFS (no special madvise) 4 fio threads, 5 THP allocating threads ---------------------------------------------------------------- 4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9: 215698 4.20-rc3+patch: 200210 (7% reduction) thpfioscale Fault Latencies 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Amean fault-base-5 1350.05 ( 0.00%) 1346.45 ( 0.27%) Amean fault-huge-5 4181.01 ( 0.00%) 3418.60 ( 18.24%) 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Percentage huge-5 1.15 ( 0.00%) 0.78 ( -31.88%) The reduction of external fragmentation events is slight and this is partially due to the removal of __GFP_THISNODE in commit ac5b2c18911f ("mm: thp: relax __GFP_THISNODE for MADV_HUGEPAGE mappings") as THP allocations can now spill over to remote nodes instead of fragmenting local memory. 2-socket Haswell machine global-dhp__workload_thpfioscale-madvhugepage-xfs (MADV_HUGEPAGE) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 4.20-rc3 extfrag events < order 9: 166352 4.20-rc3+patch: 147463 (11% reduction) thpfioscale Fault Latencies 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Amean fault-base-5 6138.97 ( 0.00%) 6217.43 ( -1.28%) Amean fault-huge-5 2294.28 ( 0.00%) 3163.33 * -37.88%* thpfioscale Percentage Faults Huge 4.20.0-rc3 4.20.0-rc3 vanilla lowzone-v5r8 Percentage huge-5 96.82 ( 0.00%) 95.14 ( -1.74%) There was a slight reduction in external fragmentation events although the latencies were higher. The allocation success rate is high enough that the system is struggling and there is quite a lot of parallel reclaim and compaction activity. There is also a certain degree of luck on whether processes start on node 0 or not for this patch but the relevance is reduced later in the series. Overall, the patch reduces the number of external fragmentation causing events so the success of THP over long periods of time would be improved for this adverse workload. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20181123114528.28802-2-mgorman@techsingularity.net Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Zi Yan <zi.yan@cs.rutgers.edu> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'mm/internal.h')
-rw-r--r--mm/internal.h13
1 files changed, 9 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/mm/internal.h b/mm/internal.h
index 6a57811ae47d..2ffe0cd64c70 100644
--- a/mm/internal.h
+++ b/mm/internal.h
@@ -490,10 +490,15 @@ unsigned long reclaim_clean_pages_from_list(struct zone *zone,
#define ALLOC_OOM ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS
#endif
-#define ALLOC_HARDER 0x10 /* try to alloc harder */
-#define ALLOC_HIGH 0x20 /* __GFP_HIGH set */
-#define ALLOC_CPUSET 0x40 /* check for correct cpuset */
-#define ALLOC_CMA 0x80 /* allow allocations from CMA areas */
+#define ALLOC_HARDER 0x10 /* try to alloc harder */
+#define ALLOC_HIGH 0x20 /* __GFP_HIGH set */
+#define ALLOC_CPUSET 0x40 /* check for correct cpuset */
+#define ALLOC_CMA 0x80 /* allow allocations from CMA areas */
+#ifdef CONFIG_ZONE_DMA32
+#define ALLOC_NOFRAGMENT 0x100 /* avoid mixing pageblock types */
+#else
+#define ALLOC_NOFRAGMENT 0x0
+#endif
enum ttu_flags;
struct tlbflush_unmap_batch;