Re: [mm PATCH v4 3/6] mm: Use memblock/zone specific iterator for handling deferred page init

[Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com>]

On Wed, 2018-10-31 at 15:40 +0000, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
> 
> On 10/17/18 7:54 PM, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> > This patch introduces a new iterator for_each_free_mem_pfn_range_in_zone.
> > 
> > This iterator will take care of making sure a given memory range provided
> > is in fact contained within a zone. It takes are of all the bounds checking
> > we were doing in deferred_grow_zone, and deferred_init_memmap. In addition
> > it should help to speed up the search a bit by iterating until the end of a
> > range is greater than the start of the zone pfn range, and will exit
> > completely if the start is beyond the end of the zone.
> > 
> > This patch adds yet another iterator called
> > for_each_free_mem_range_in_zone_from and then uses it to support
> > initializing and freeing pages in groups no larger than MAX_ORDER_NR_PAGES.
> > By doing this we can greatly improve the cache locality of the pages while
> > we do several loops over them in the init and freeing process.
> > 
> > We are able to tighten the loops as a result since we only really need the
> > checks for first_init_pfn in our first iteration and after that we can
> > assume that all future values will be greater than this. So I have added a
> > function called deferred_init_mem_pfn_range_in_zone that primes the
> > iterators and if it fails we can just exit.
> > 
> > On my x86_64 test system with 384GB of memory per node I saw a reduction in
> > initialization time from 1.85s to 1.38s as a result of this patch.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Alexander Duyck <alexander.h.duyck@linux.intel.com>
> 
> Hi Alex,
> 
> Could you please split this patch into two parts:
> 
> 1. Add deferred_init_maxorder()
> 2. Add memblock iterator?
> 
> This would allow a better bisecting in case of problems. Chaning two
> loops into deferred_init_maxorder() while a good idea, is still
> non-trivial and might lead to bugs.
> 
> Thank you,
> Pavel

I can do that, but I will need to flip the order. I will add the new
iterator first and then deferred_init_maxorder. Otherwise the
intermediate step ends up being too much throw-away code.

- Alex