linux/mm
Christoph Lameter 7cc36bbddd vmstat: on-demand vmstat workers V8
vmstat workers are used for folding counter differentials into the zone,
per node and global counters at certain time intervals.  They currently
run at defined intervals on all processors which will cause some holdoff
for processors that need minimal intrusion by the OS.

The current vmstat_update mechanism depends on a deferrable timer firing
every other second by default which registers a work queue item that runs
on the local CPU, with the result that we have 1 interrupt and one
additional schedulable task on each CPU every 2 seconds If a workload
indeed causes VM activity or multiple tasks are running on a CPU, then
there are probably bigger issues to deal with.

However, some workloads dedicate a CPU for a single CPU bound task.  This
is done in high performance computing, in high frequency financial
applications, in networking (Intel DPDK, EZchip NPS) and with the advent
of systems with more and more CPUs over time, this may become more and
more common to do since when one has enough CPUs one cares less about
efficiently sharing a CPU with other tasks and more about efficiently
monopolizing a CPU per task.

The difference of having this timer firing and workqueue kernel thread
scheduled per second can be enormous.  An artificial test measuring the
worst case time to do a simple "i++" in an endless loop on a bare metal
system and under Linux on an isolated CPU with dynticks and with and
without this patch, have Linux match the bare metal performance (~700
cycles) with this patch and loose by couple of orders of magnitude (~200k
cycles) without it[*].  The loss occurs for something that just calculates
statistics.  For networking applications, for example, this could be the
difference between dropping packets or sustaining line rate.

Statistics are important and useful, but it would be great if there would
be a way to not cause statistics gathering produce a huge performance
difference.  This patche does just that.

This patch creates a vmstat shepherd worker that monitors the per cpu
differentials on all processors.  If there are differentials on a
processor then a vmstat worker local to the processors with the
differentials is created.  That worker will then start folding the diffs
in regular intervals.  Should the worker find that there is no work to be
done then it will make the shepherd worker monitor the differentials
again.

With this patch it is possible then to have periods longer than
2 seconds without any OS event on a "cpu" (hardware thread).

The patch shows a very minor increased in system performance.

hackbench -s 512 -l 2000 -g 15 -f 25 -P

Results before the patch:

Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.992
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.971
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 5.063

Hackbench after the patch:

Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.973
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.990
Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks)
Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes
Time: 4.993

[fengguang.wu@intel.com: cpu_stat_off can be static]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Reviewed-by: Gilad Ben-Yossef <gilad@benyossef.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Cc: Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
Cc: Hakan Akkan <hakanakkan@gmail.com>
Cc: Max Krasnyansky <maxk@qti.qualcomm.com>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-10-09 22:26:02 -04:00
..
backing-dev.c mm: clean up zone flags 2014-10-09 22:25:57 -04:00
balloon_compaction.c mm/balloon_compaction: add vmstat counters and kpageflags bit 2014-10-09 22:26:01 -04:00
bootmem.c mm/bootmem.c: use include/linux/ headers 2014-10-09 22:26:00 -04:00
cleancache.c
cma.c mm: cma: adjust address limit to avoid hitting low/high memory boundary 2014-10-09 22:25:53 -04:00
compaction.c mm/balloon_compaction: redesign ballooned pages management 2014-10-09 22:26:01 -04:00
debug-pagealloc.c
debug.c mm/debug.c: use pr_emerg() 2014-10-09 22:25:59 -04:00
dmapool.c mm/dmapool.c: fixed a brace coding style issue 2014-10-09 22:26:00 -04:00
early_ioremap.c mm: create generic early_ioremap() support 2014-04-07 16:36:15 -07:00
fadvise.c
failslab.c
filemap_xip.c
filemap.c mm/filemap.c: remove trailing whitespace 2014-10-09 22:26:00 -04:00
fremap.c mm: mark remap_file_pages() syscall as deprecated 2014-06-06 16:08:17 -07:00
frontswap.c swap: change swap_list_head to plist, add swap_avail_head 2014-06-04 16:54:07 -07:00
gup.c mm: introduce a general RCU get_user_pages_fast() 2014-10-09 22:26:00 -04:00
highmem.c mm/highmem: make kmap cache coloring aware 2014-08-06 18:01:22 -07:00
huge_memory.c mm: use VM_BUG_ON_MM where possible 2014-10-09 22:25:58 -04:00
hugetlb_cgroup.c hugetlb_cgroup: use lockdep_assert_held rather than spin_is_locked 2014-08-29 16:28:16 -07:00
hugetlb.c mm: convert a few VM_BUG_ON callers to VM_BUG_ON_VMA 2014-10-09 22:25:57 -04:00
hwpoison-inject.c mm/hwpoison-inject.c: remove unnecessary null test before debugfs_remove_recursive 2014-08-06 18:01:19 -07:00
init-mm.c
internal.h mm, compaction: pass gfp mask to compact_control 2014-10-09 22:25:55 -04:00
interval_tree.c mm: convert a few VM_BUG_ON callers to VM_BUG_ON_VMA 2014-10-09 22:25:57 -04:00
iov_iter.c fuse: honour max_read and max_write in direct_io mode 2014-09-26 21:16:51 -04:00
Kconfig mm/balloon_compaction: add vmstat counters and kpageflags bit 2014-10-09 22:26:01 -04:00
Kconfig.debug
kmemcheck.c mm/slab_common: move kmem_cache definition to internal header 2014-10-09 22:25:50 -04:00
kmemleak-test.c mm/kmemleak-test.c: use pr_fmt for logging 2014-06-06 16:08:18 -07:00
kmemleak.c mm: introduce kmemleak_update_trace() 2014-06-06 16:08:17 -07:00
ksm.c mm: ksm use pr_err instead of printk 2014-10-09 22:26:00 -04:00
list_lru.c mm: keep page cache radix tree nodes in check 2014-04-03 16:21:01 -07:00
maccess.c
madvise.c mm: update the description for madvise_remove 2014-08-06 18:01:18 -07:00
Makefile mm/balloon_compaction: add vmstat counters and kpageflags bit 2014-10-09 22:26:01 -04:00
memblock.c mem-hotplug: let memblock skip the hotpluggable memory regions in __next_mem_range() 2014-09-10 15:42:12 -07:00
memcontrol.c memcg: zap memcg_can_account_kmem 2014-10-09 22:26:00 -04:00
memory_hotplug.c memory-hotplug: add sysfs valid_zones attribute 2014-10-09 22:25:52 -04:00
memory-failure.c hwpoison: fix race with changing page during offlining 2014-08-06 18:01:19 -07:00
memory.c mm: softdirty: keep bit when zapping file pte 2014-09-26 08:10:35 -07:00
mempolicy.c mm: mempolicy: skip inaccessible VMAs when setting MPOL_MF_LAZY 2014-10-09 22:26:02 -04:00
mempool.c mm/mempool.c: update the kmemleak stack trace for mempool allocations 2014-06-06 16:08:17 -07:00
migrate.c mm/balloon_compaction: redesign ballooned pages management 2014-10-09 22:26:01 -04:00
mincore.c mm + fs: prepare for non-page entries in page cache radix trees 2014-04-03 16:21:00 -07:00
mlock.c mm: use VM_BUG_ON_MM where possible 2014-10-09 22:25:58 -04:00
mm_init.c mm: bring back /sys/kernel/mm 2014-01-27 21:02:39 -08:00
mmap.c mm: use VM_BUG_ON_MM where possible 2014-10-09 22:25:58 -04:00
mmu_context.c sched/mm: call finish_arch_post_lock_switch in idle_task_exit and use_mm 2014-02-21 08:50:17 +01:00
mmu_notifier.c kvm: Fix page ageing bugs 2014-09-24 14:07:58 +02:00
mmzone.c
mprotect.c mm: move mmu notifier call from change_protection to change_pmd_range 2014-04-07 16:35:50 -07:00
mremap.c mm/mremap.c: use linux headers 2014-10-09 22:26:00 -04:00
msync.c msync: fix incorrect fstart calculation 2014-07-03 09:21:53 -07:00
nobootmem.c mem-hotplug: let memblock skip the hotpluggable memory regions in __next_mem_range() 2014-09-10 15:42:12 -07:00
nommu.c arm64,ia64,ppc,s390,sh,tile,um,x86,mm: remove default gate area 2014-08-08 15:57:27 -07:00
oom_kill.c mm: clean up zone flags 2014-10-09 22:25:57 -04:00
page_alloc.c mm: move debug code out of page_alloc.c 2014-10-09 22:25:58 -04:00
page_cgroup.c mm/page_cgroup.c: mark functions as static 2014-04-03 16:21:02 -07:00
page_io.c fix __swap_writepage() compile failure on old gcc versions 2014-06-14 19:30:48 -05:00
page_isolation.c
page-writeback.c mm/page-writeback.c: use min3/max3 macros to avoid shadow warnings 2014-10-09 22:25:57 -04:00
pagewalk.c mm: use VM_BUG_ON_MM where possible 2014-10-09 22:25:58 -04:00
percpu-km.c
percpu-vm.c percpu: perform tlb flush after pcpu_map_pages() failure 2014-08-15 16:06:10 -04:00
percpu.c percpu: free percpu allocation info for uniprocessor system 2014-08-16 08:59:02 -04:00
pgtable-generic.c mm: actually clear pmd_numa before invalidating 2014-08-29 16:28:15 -07:00
process_vm_access.c start adding the tag to iov_iter 2014-05-06 17:32:49 -04:00
quicklist.c
readahead.c mm/readahead.c: remove unused file_ra_state from count_history_pages 2014-08-06 18:01:15 -07:00
rmap.c mm: convert a few VM_BUG_ON callers to VM_BUG_ON_VMA 2014-10-09 22:25:57 -04:00
shmem.c include/linux/migrate.h: remove migrate_page #define 2014-10-09 22:25:56 -04:00
slab_common.c memcg: move memcg_update_cache_size() to slab_common.c 2014-10-09 22:25:59 -04:00
slab.c mm/slab.c: use __seq_open_private() instead of seq_open() 2014-10-09 22:25:57 -04:00
slab.h mm/slab: use percpu allocator for cpu cache 2014-10-09 22:25:51 -04:00
slob.c mm/sl[ao]b: always track caller in kmalloc_(node_)track_caller() 2014-10-09 22:25:50 -04:00
slub.c mm/slab_common: commonize slab merge logic 2014-10-09 22:25:51 -04:00
sparse-vmemmap.c
sparse.c mm: use macros from compiler.h instead of __attribute__((...)) 2014-04-07 16:35:54 -07:00
swap_state.c mm: memcontrol: do not kill uncharge batching in free_pages_and_swap_cache 2014-10-09 22:25:59 -04:00
swap.c mm: memcontrol: do not kill uncharge batching in free_pages_and_swap_cache 2014-10-09 22:25:59 -04:00
swapfile.c mm: memcontrol: rewrite uncharge API 2014-08-08 15:57:17 -07:00
truncate.c mm: memcontrol: rewrite uncharge API 2014-08-08 15:57:17 -07:00
util.c proc/maps: make vm_is_stack() logic namespace-friendly 2014-10-09 22:25:50 -04:00
vmacache.c mm,vmacache: optimize overflow system-wide flushing 2014-06-04 16:53:57 -07:00
vmalloc.c mm/vmalloc.c: use seq_open_private() instead of seq_open() 2014-10-09 22:25:56 -04:00
vmpressure.c arm, pm, vmpressure: add missing slab.h includes 2014-02-03 13:24:01 -05:00
vmscan.c mm: memcontrol: fix transparent huge page allocations under pressure 2014-10-09 22:25:59 -04:00
vmstat.c vmstat: on-demand vmstat workers V8 2014-10-09 22:26:02 -04:00
workingset.c mm: keep page cache radix tree nodes in check 2014-04-03 16:21:01 -07:00
zbud.c mm/zpool: use prefixed module loading 2014-08-29 16:28:16 -07:00
zpool.c mm/zpool: use prefixed module loading 2014-08-29 16:28:16 -07:00
zsmalloc.c mm/zpool: use prefixed module loading 2014-08-29 16:28:16 -07:00
zswap.c mm/zswap.c: add __init to zswap_entry_cache_destroy() 2014-08-08 15:57:18 -07:00