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Message-Id: <20070711094600.b2a525d5.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:46:00 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To: Andy Whitcroft <apw@...dowen.org>
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Mel Gorman <mel@....ul.ie>,
Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>,
Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>
Subject: Re: -mm merge plans -- lumpy reclaim
On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:34:31 +0100 Andy Whitcroft <apw@...dowen.org> wrote:
> [Seems a PEBKAC occured on the subject line, resending lest it become a
> victim of "oh thats spam".]
>
> Andy Whitcroft wrote:
> > Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >> lumpy-reclaim-v4.patch
> >> have-kswapd-keep-a-minimum-order-free-other-than-order-0.patch
> >> only-check-absolute-watermarks-for-alloc_high-and-alloc_harder-allocations.patch
> >>
> >> Lumpy reclaim. In a similar situation to Mel's patches. Stuck due to
> >> general lack or interest and effort.
> >
> > The lumpy reclaim patches originally came out of work to support Mel's
> > anti-fragmentation work. As such I think they have become somewhat
> > attached to those patches. Whilst lumpy is most effective where
> > placement controls are in place as offered by Mel's work, we see benefit
> > from reduction in the "blunderbuss" effect when we reclaim at higher
> > orders. While placement control is pretty much required for the very
> > highest orders such as huge page size, lower order allocations are
> > benefited in terms of lower collateral damage.
> >
> > There are now a few areas other than huge page allocations which can
> > benefit. Stacks are still order 1. Jumbo frames want higher order
> > contiguous pages for there incoming hardware buffers. SLUB is showing
> > performance benefits from moving to a higher allocation order. All of
> > these should benefit from more aggressive targeted reclaim, indeed I
> > have been surprised just how often my test workloads trigger lumpy at
> > order 1 to get new stacks.
> >
> > Truly representative work loads are hard to generate for some of these.
> > Though we have heard some encouraging noises from those who can
> > reproduce these problems.
I'd expect that the main application for lumpy-reclaim is in keeping a pool
of order-2 (say) pages in reserve for GFP_ATOMIC allocators. ie: jumbo
frames.
At present this relies upon the wakeup_kswapd(..., order) mechanism.
How effective is this at solving the jumbo frame problem?
(And do we still have a jumbo frame problem? Reports seems to have subsided)
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