Re: [PATCH] perf_events: improve DS/BTS/PEBS buffer allocation

Stephane Eranian
2010-09-13T15:21:36Z

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-09-13 at 16:55 +0200, Stephane Eranian wrote:
>> The DS, BTS, and PEBS memory regions were allocated using kzalloc(), i.e.,
>> requesting contiguous physical memory. There is no such restriction on
>> DS, PEBS and BTS buffers. Using kzalloc() could lead to error in case
>> no contiguous physical memory is available. BTS is requesting 64KB,
>> thus it can cause issues. PEBS is currently only requesting one page.
>> Both PEBS and BTS are static buffers allocated for each CPU at the
>> first user. When the last user exists, the buffers are released.
>>
>> All buffers are only accessed on the CPU they are attached to.
>> kzalloc() does not take into account NUMA, thus all allocations
>> are taking place on the NUMA node where the perf_event_open() is
>> made.
>
> I guess that should have been a alloc_pages_node() indeed.
>
>> This patch switches allocation to vmalloc_node() to use non-contiguous
>> physical memory and to allocate on the NUMA node corresponding to each
>> CPU. We switched DS and PEBS although they do not cause problems today,
>> to, at least, make the allocation on the correct NUMA node. In the future,
>> the PEBS buffer size may increase. DS may also grow bigger than a page.
>> This patch eliminates the memory allocation imbalance.
>
> I'm not really a fan of vmalloc, have you actually observed allocation
> failures for these 64k (order-4) allocations?
>
I did with small amount of memory in containers, after stressing
the system with perf for instance.

>
>