From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934718AbXK3DON (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:14:13 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1758190AbXK3DNx (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:13:53 -0500 Received: from e33.co.us.ibm.com ([32.97.110.151]:42930 "EHLO e33.co.us.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S933501AbXK3DNv (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:13:51 -0500 Message-ID: <474F7FDF.3000506@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:43:35 +0530 From: Balbir Singh Reply-To: balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com Organization: IBM User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (X11/20071022) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Nick Piggin CC: Linux Memory Management List , Andrew Morton , linux kernel mailing list , Peter Zijlstra , Hugh Dickins , Lee Schermerhorn , KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki , Pavel Emelianov , YAMAMOTO Takashi , Rik van Riel , Christoph Lameter , "Martin J. Bligh" , Andy Whitcroft , Srivatsa Vaddagiri Subject: Re: What can we do to get ready for memory controller merge in 2.6.25 References: <474ED005.7060300@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <200711301311.48291.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> In-Reply-To: <200711301311.48291.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Nick Piggin wrote: > On Friday 30 November 2007 01:43, Balbir Singh wrote: >> They say better strike when the iron is hot. >> >> Since we have so many people discussing the memory controller, I would >> like to access the readiness of the memory controller for mainline >> merge. Given that we have some time until the merge window, I'd like to >> set aside some time (from my other work items) to work on the memory >> controller, fix review comments and defects. >> >> In the past, we've received several useful comments from Rik Van Riel, >> Lee Schermerhorn, Peter Zijlstra, Hugh Dickins, Nick Piggin, Paul Menage >> and code contributions and bug fixes from Hugh Dickins, Pavel Emelianov, >> Lee Schermerhorn, YAMAMOTO-San, Andrew Morton and KAMEZAWA-San. I >> apologize if I missed out any other names or contributions >> >> At the VM-Summit we decided to try the current double LRU approach for >> memory control. At this juncture in the space-time continuum, I seek >> your support, feedback, comments and help to move the memory controller > > Do you have any test cases, performance numbers, etc.? And also some > results or even anecdotes of where this is going to be used would be > interesting... > Some test results were posted at http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/17/69 http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/19/36 http://lwn.net/Articles/242554/ Some results for the RSS controller can be found in the OLS paper https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/singh-Reprint.pdf and at http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/18/1 As far as test cases are concerned, I have a simple test case that I use that allocates memory and touches all the allocated memory in a loop. I can post that out if required. It uses various types of allocation 1. mmaped memory 2. anonymous memory 3. shared memory I also run various benchmarks inside a control group, limited to 400 MB of RAM. One interesting that I noticed was that when I booted with mem= and created a container with the same . The swapout test case ran much faster in the container (NOTE: This was prior to the swap cache changes). KAMEZAWA-San posted some test results on background reclaim and per zone reclaim http://forum.openvz.org/index.php?t=tree&th=4696&mid=23964&&rev=&reveal= The simplest use cases that come to mind are 1. Memory control for containers/virtualization 2. Job Isolation -- Warm Regards, Balbir Singh Linux Technology Center IBM, ISTL