Re: [RFC PATCH 0/8][Sorted-buddy] mm: Linux VM Infrastructure to support Memory Power Management

["Srivatsa S. Bhat" <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 11/09/2012 08:21 PM, Srivatsa S. Bhat wrote:
> On 11/09/2012 02:30 PM, Mel Gorman wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 10:44:16AM +0530, Vaidyanathan Srinivasan wrote:
>>> * Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> [2012-11-08 18:02:57]:
[...]
>>>>> Short description of the "Sorted-buddy" design:
>>>>> -----------------------------------------------
>>>>>
>>>>> In this design, the memory region boundaries are captured in a parallel
>>>>> data-structure instead of fitting regions between nodes and zones in the
>>>>> hierarchy. Further, the buddy allocator is altered, such that we maintain the
>>>>> zones' freelists in region-sorted-order and thus do page allocation in the
>>>>> order of increasing memory regions.
>>>>
>>>> Implying that this sorting has to happen in the either the alloc or free
>>>> fast path.
>>>
>>> Yes, in the free path. This optimization can be actually be delayed in
>>> the free fast path and completely avoided if our memory is full and we
>>> are doing direct reclaim during allocations.
>>>
>>
>> Hurting the free fast path is a bad idea as there are workloads that depend
>> on it (buffer allocation and free) even though many workloads do *not*
>> notice it because the bulk of the cost is incurred at exit time. As
>> memory low power usage has many caveats (may be impossible if a page
>> table is allocated in the region for example) but CPU usage has less
>> restrictions it is more important that the CPU usage be kept low.
>>
>> That means, little or no modification to the fastpath. Sorting or linear
>> searches should be minimised or avoided.
>>
> 
> Right. For example, in the previous "hierarchy" design[1], there was no overhead
> in any of the fast paths. Because it split up the zones themselves, so that
> they fit on memory region boundaries. But that design had other problems, like
> zone fragmentation (too many zones).. which kind of out-weighed the benefit
> obtained from zero overhead in the fast-paths. So one of the suggested
> alternatives during that review[2], was to explore modifying the buddy allocator
> to be aware of memory region boundaries, which this "sorted-buddy" design
> implements.
> 
> [1]. http://lwn.net/Articles/445045/
>      http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/63840
>      http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/89202
> 
> [2]. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.power-management.general/24862
>      http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.power-management.general/25061
>      http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/64689 
> 
> In this patchset, I have tried to minimize the overhead on the fastpaths.
> For example, I have used a special 'next_region' data-structure to keep the
> alloc path fast. Also, in the free path, we don't need to keep the free
> lists fully address sorted; having them region-sorted is sufficient. Of course
> we could explore more ways of avoiding overhead in the fast paths, or even a
> different design that promises to be much better overall. I'm all ears for
> any suggestions :-)
> 

FWIW, kernbench is actually (and surprisingly) showing a slight performance
*improvement* with this patchset, over vanilla 3.7-rc3, as I mentioned in
my other email to Dave.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/11/7/428

I don't think I can dismiss it as an experimental error, because I am seeing
those results consistently.. I'm trying to find out what's behind that.

Regards,
Srivatsa S. Bhat

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