Re: PG_zero

Nick Piggin
2004-11-01T18:31:32Z

Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> This experiment is incremental with lowmem_reserve-3 (downloadble in the
> same place), and it's against 2.6.9, it rejects against kernel CVS but
> it should be easy to fixup.
>
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/patches/v2.6/2.6.9/PG_zero-2
>

...

> Some fix included in the patch is to fallback in the quicklist for the
> whole classzone before eating from the buddy, otherwise 1G boxes are
> very penalized in terms of entering the buddy system too early, and not
> using the quicklists of the lower zones (2.4-aa wasn't penalized). Plus
> this adds a sysctl so the thing is tunable at runtime. And there was no
> need of using two quicklists for cold and hot pages, less resources are
> wasted by just using the lru ordering to diferentiate from hot/cold
> allocations and hot/cold freeing.
>

Not sure if this is wise. Reclaimed pages should definitely be cache
cold. Other freeing is assumed cache hot and LRU ordered on the hot
list which seems right... but I think you want the cold list for page
reclaim, don't you?

> The API with PG_zero is that if you set __GFP_ZERO in the gfp_mask, then
> you must check PG_zero. If PG_zero is set, then you don't need to clear
> the page. However you must clear PG_zero before freeing the page if its
> contents are not zero anymore by the time you free it, or future users
> of __GFP_ZERO will be screwed. So the pagetables for example never clear
> PG_zero for the whole duration of the page, infact they set PG_zero if
> they're forced to execute clear_page. shmem as well in a fail path if it
> fails getting an entry it will free the zero page again and it won't
> have to touch PG_zero since it didn't modify the page contents.
>

Could the API be made nicer by clearing the page for you if it didn't
find a PG_zero page?

>
> Obvious improvements would be to implement a long_write_zero(ptr)
> operation that doesn't pollute the cache. IIRC it exists on the alpha, I
> assume it exists on x86/x86-64 too. But that's incremental on top of
> this.
>
> It seems stable, I'm running it while writing this.
>
> I guess testing on a memory bound architecture would be more interesting
> (more cpus will make it more memory bound somewhat).
>
> Comments welcome.
>

I have the feeling that it might not be worthwhile doing zero on idle.
You've got chance of blowing the cache on zeroing pages that won't be
used for a while. If you do uncached writes then you've changed the
problem to memory bandwidth (I guess doesn't matter much on UP).

It seems like a good idea to do zero pages in the page allocator if
at all (rather than slab), but I guess you don't want to complicate
it unless it shows improvements in macro benchmarks.

Sorry my feedback isn't much, it is not based on previous experience.