[PATCH 1/3] mm, meminit: Recalculate pcpu batch and high limits after init completes

Mel Gorman
2019-10-21T09:48:15Z

Deferred memory initialisation updates zone->managed_pages during
the initialisation phase but before that finishes, the per-cpu page
allocator (pcpu) calculates the number of pages allocated/freed in
batches as well as the maximum number of pages allowed on a per-cpu list.
As zone->managed_pages is not up to date yet, the pcpu initialisation
calculates inappropriately low batch and high values.

This increases zone lock contention quite severely in some cases with the
degree of severity depending on how many CPUs share a local zone and the
size of the zone. A private report indicated that kernel build times were
excessive with extremely high system CPU usage. A perf profile indicated
that a large chunk of time was lost on zone->lock contention.

This patch recalculates the pcpu batch and high values after deferred
initialisation completes for every populated zone in the system. It
was tested on a 2-socket AMD EPYC 2 machine using a kernel compilation
workload -- allmodconfig and all available CPUs.

mmtests configuration: config-workload-kernbench-max
Configuration was modified to build on a fresh XFS partition.

kernbench
5.4.0-rc3 5.4.0-rc3
vanilla resetpcpu-v2
Amean user-256 13249.50 ( 0.00%) 16401.31 * -23.79%*
Amean syst-256 14760.30 ( 0.00%) 4448.39 * 69.86%*
Amean elsp-256 162.42 ( 0.00%) 119.13 * 26.65%*
Stddev user-256 42.97 ( 0.00%) 19.15 ( 55.43%)
Stddev syst-256 336.87 ( 0.00%) 6.71 ( 98.01%)
Stddev elsp-256 2.46 ( 0.00%) 0.39 ( 84.03%)

5.4.0-rc3 5.4.0-rc3
vanilla resetpcpu-v2
Duration User 39766.24 49221.79
Duration System 44298.10 13361.67
Duration Elapsed 519.11 388.87

The patch reduces system CPU usage by 69.86% and total build time by
26.65%. The variance of system CPU usage is also much reduced.

Before, this was the breakdown of batch and high values over all zones was.

256 batch: 1
256 batch: 63
512 batch: 7
256 high: 0
256 high: 378
512 high: 42

512 pcpu pagesets had a batch limit of 7 and a high limit of 42. After the patch

256 batch: 1
768 batch: 63
256 high: 0
768 high: 378

Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v4.1+
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
---
mm/page_alloc.c | 8 ++++++++
1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index c0b2e0306720..f972076d0f6b 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -1947,6 +1947,14 @@ void __init page_alloc_init_late(void)
/* Block until all are initialised */
wait_for_completion(&pgdat_init_all_done_comp);

+ /*
+ * The number of managed pages has changed due to the initialisation
+ * so the pcpu batch and high limits needs to be updated or the limits
+ * will be artificially small.
+ */
+ for_each_populated_zone(zone)
+ zone_pcp_update(zone);
+
/*
* We initialized the rest of the deferred pages. Permanently disable
* on-demand struct page initialization.
--
2.16.4