Date:	Sun, 08 Jul 2007 20:23:06 +1000
From:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
CC:	Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-mm@...r.kernel.org, suresh.b.siddha@...el.com,
	corey.d.gough@...el.com, Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, Matt Mackall <mpm@...enic.com>,
	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>
Subject: Re: [patch 09/10] Remove the SLOB allocator for 2.6.23

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I said exactly the same thing last time this came up. I would love to 
>>remove code if its functionality can be adequately replaced by 
>>existing code, but I think your reasons for removing SLOB aren't that 
>>good, and just handwaving away the significant memory savings doesn't 
>>work.
> 
> 
> yeah. Also, the decision here is pretty easy: the behavior of the 
> allocator is not really visible to applications. So this isnt like 
> having a parallel IO scheduler or a parallel process scheduler (which 
> cause problems to us by fragmenting the application space) - so the 
> long-term cost to us kernel maintainers should be relatively low.

Yep.


>>>A year ago the -rt kernel defaulted to the SLOB for a few releases, 
>>>and barring some initial scalability issues (which were solved in 
>>>-rt) it worked pretty well on generic PCs, so i dont buy the 'it 
>>>doesnt work' argument either.
>>
>>It's actually recently been made to work on SMP, it is much more 
>>scalable to large memories, and some initial NUMA work is happening 
>>that some embedded guys are interested in, all without increasing 
>>static footprint too much, and it has actually decreased dynamic 
>>footprint too.
> 
> 
> cool. I was referring to something else: people were running -rt on 
> their beefy desktop boxes with several gigs of RAM they complained about 
> the slowdown that is caused by SLOB's linear list walking.

That is what I meant by scalable to large memories. It is not perfect,
but it is much better now. I noticed huge slowdowns too when test booting
the slob RCU patch on my 4GB desktop, so I did a few things to improve
freelist walking as well (the patches are in -mm, prefixed with slob-).

Afterwards, performance seems to be fairly good (obviously not as good
as SLAB or SLUB on such a configuration, but definitely usable and the
desktop was not noticably slower).


> Steve Rostedt did two nice changes to fix those scalability problems. 
> I've attached Steve's two patches. With these in place SLOB was very 
> usable for large systems as well, with no measurable overhead. 
> (obviously the lack of per-cpu caching can still be measured, but it's a 
> lot less of a problem in practice than the linear list walking was.)

Thanks for sending those. One is actually obsolete because we removed
bigblock list completely, however I had not seen the other one. Such an
approach could be used, OTOH, having all allocations come from the same
pool does have its advantages in terms of memory usage.

I don't think it has been quite decided on the next step to take with
SLOB, however I have an idea that if we had per-cpu freelists (where
other lists could be used as a fallback), then that would go a long way
to improving the SMP scalability, CPU cache hotness, and long list
walking issues all at once.

However I like the fact that there is no need for a big rush to improve
it, and so patches and ideas can be brewed up slowly :)

Thanks,
Nick

-- 
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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