Re: [PATCH] arm64: Increase the max granular size

Catalin Marinas
2015-11-09T18:36:14Z

On Mon, Nov 09, 2015 at 04:41:58PM +0900, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> 2015-11-05 21:17 GMT+09:00 Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>:
> > On Thu, Nov 05, 2015 at 08:45:08PM +0900, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> >> If it isn't possible, is there another way to reduce memory waste due to
> >> increase of dma alignment requirement in arm64?
> >
> > I first need to see how significant the impact is (especially for
> > embedded/mobiles platforms).
>
> I don't have any ARM64 device. What I have just one report
> about slab usage from our developer.
>
> The report shows slab usage just after android boot is done
> in ARM64.
>
> Total slab usage: 90 MB
> kmalloc usage: 25 MB
> kmalloc (<=64) usage: 7 MB
>
> This would be measured without slab_nomerge so there is
> a possibility that some usages on kmem_cache is merged
> into usage of kmalloc (<=64).
>
> Anyway, if ARM64 increase L1_CACHE_BYTES to 128, roughly
> 7 MB would be wasted. I don't know how this picture is varied
> in runtime, but, even boot time overhead, 7 MB looks large to me.

7MB is considerable but I guess it wouldn't be all wasted with
L1_CACHE_BYTES == 128, maybe half or slightly over. It would be good to
know the other kmalloc caches, maybe up to 256.

I don't have an Android filesystem but I just tried to boot Arch
(aarch64). Immediately after boot and slab_nomerge, with 128 L1 I get:

kmalloc-128: 6624
kmalloc-256: 1488

With L1 64, I get:

kmalloc-64: 5760
kmalloc-128: 1152
kmalloc-192: 1155
kmalloc-256: 320

So that's about 1.2MB vs 0.8MB. The ratio is 3:2, though I'm not sure it
will stay the same as the slab usage increases.

It would be good to get more numbers, we could add a Kconfig option just
for specific builds while keeping the default to 128.

--
Catalin