Re: [v3 0/9] parallelized "struct page" zeroing

Pasha Tatashin
2017-05-15T20:44:26Z

On 05/15/2017 03:38 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 15-05-17 14:12:10, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
>> Hi Michal,
>>
>> After looking at your suggested memblock_virt_alloc_core() change again, I
>> decided to keep what I have. I do not want to inline
>> memblock_virt_alloc_internal(), because it is not a performance critical
>> path, and by inlining it we will unnecessarily increase the text size on all
>> platforms.
>
> I do not insist but I would really _prefer_ if the bool zero argument
> didn't proliferate all over the memblock API.

Sure, I will remove zero boolean argument from
memblock_virt_alloc_internal(), and do memset() calls inside callers.

>
>> Also, because it will be very hard to make sure that no platform regresses
>> by making memset() default in _memblock_virt_alloc_core() (as I already
>> showed last week at least sun4v SPARC64 will require special changes in
>> order for this to work), I decided to make it available only for "deferred
>> struct page init" case. As, what is already in the patch.
>
> I do not think this is the right approach. Your measurements just show
> that sparc could have a more optimized memset for small sizes. If you
> keep the same memset only for the parallel initialization then you
> just hide this fact. I wouldn't worry about other architectures. All
> sane architectures should simply work reasonably well when touching a
> single or only few cache lines at the same time. If some arches really
> suffer from small memsets then the initialization should be driven by a
> specific ARCH_WANT_LARGE_PAGEBLOCK_INIT rather than making this depend
> on DEFERRED_INIT. Or if you are too worried then make it opt-in and make
> it depend on ARCH_WANT_PER_PAGE_INIT and make it enabled for x86 and
> sparc after memset optimization.

OK, I will think about this.

I do not really like adding new configs because they tend to clutter the
code. This is why, I wanted to rely on already existing config that I
know benefits all platforms that use it. Eventually,
"CONFIG_DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT" is going to become the default
everywhere, as there should not be a drawback of using it even on small
machines.

Pasha