kernel-ark/include
Mel Gorman c6286c9839 mm: add tracepoints for LRU activation and insertions
Andrew Perepechko reported a problem whereby pages are being prematurely
evicted as the mark_page_accessed() hint is ignored for pages that are
currently on a pagevec --
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ext4/msg37340.html .

Alexey Lyahkov and Robin Dong have also reported problems recently that
could be due to hot pages reaching the end of the inactive list too
quickly and be reclaimed.

Rather than addressing this on a per-filesystem basis, this series aims
to fix the mark_page_accessed() interface by deferring what LRU a page
is added to pagevec drain time and allowing mark_page_accessed() to call
SetPageActive on a pagevec page.

Patch 1 adds two tracepoints for LRU page activation and insertion. Using
	these processes it's possible to build a model of pages in the
	LRU that can be processed offline.

Patch 2 defers making the decision on what LRU to add a page to until when
	the pagevec is drained.

Patch 3 searches the local pagevec for pages to mark PageActive on
	mark_page_accessed. The changelog explains why only the local
	pagevec is examined.

Patches 4 and 5 tidy up the API.

postmark, a dd-based test and fs-mark both single and threaded mode were
run but none of them showed any performance degradation or gain as a
result of the patch.

Using patch 1, I built a *very* basic model of the LRU to examine
offline what the average age of different page types on the LRU were in
milliseconds.  Of course, capturing the trace distorts the test as it's
written to local disk but it does not matter for the purposes of this
test.  The average age of pages in milliseconds were

				    vanilla deferdrain
Average age mapped anon:               1454       1250
Average age mapped file:             127841     155552
Average age unmapped anon:               85        235
Average age unmapped file:            73633      38884
Average age unmapped buffers:         74054     116155

The LRU activity was mostly files which you'd expect for a dd-based
workload.  Note that the average age of buffer pages is increased by the
series and it is expected this is due to the fact that the buffer pages
are now getting added to the active list when drained from the pagevecs.
Note that the average age of the unmapped file data is decreased as they
are still added to the inactive list and are reclaimed before the
buffers.

There is no guarantee this is a universal win for all workloads and it
would be nice if the filesystem people gave some thought as to whether
this decision is generally a win or a loss.

This patch:

Using these tracepoints it is possible to model LRU activity and the
average residency of pages of different types.  This can be used to
debug problems related to premature reclaim of pages of particular
types.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Alexey Lyahkov <alexey.lyashkov@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrew Perepechko <anserper@ya.ru>
Cc: Robin Dong <sanbai@taobao.com>
Cc: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Bernd Schubert <bernd.schubert@fastmail.fm>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-07-03 16:07:31 -07:00
..
acpi ACPI / dock / PCI: Synchronous handling of dock events for PCI devices 2013-06-24 11:22:53 +02:00
asm-generic mm: soft-dirty bits for user memory changes tracking 2013-07-03 16:07:26 -07:00
clocksource clocksource: arch_timer: use virtual counters 2013-06-07 10:20:28 +01:00
crypto
drm Merge branch 'drm-radeon-sun-hainan' of git://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/linux 2013-05-21 08:50:57 -07:00
dt-bindings ARM SoC driver specific changes 2013-07-02 14:33:21 -07:00
keys
linux vmalloc: introduce remap_vmalloc_range_partial 2013-07-03 16:07:30 -07:00
math-emu
media Merge branch 'v4l_for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mchehab/linux-media 2013-06-18 06:25:08 -10:00
memory
misc
net ip_tunnel: remove __net_init/exit from exported functions 2013-06-13 03:00:59 -07:00
pcmcia
ras
rdma
rxrpc
scsi Merge branch 'postmerge' into for-linus 2013-05-10 07:54:01 -07:00
sound ASoC: dapm: Treat DAI widgets like AIF widgets for power 2013-06-07 15:54:50 +01:00
target target: Propigate up ->cmd_kref put return via transport_generic_free_cmd 2013-05-31 01:21:23 -07:00
trace mm: add tracepoints for LRU activation and insertions 2013-07-03 16:07:31 -07:00
uapi Main features: 2013-07-03 10:31:38 -07:00
video Merge branch 'fbdev-3.10-fixes' of git://gitorious.org/linux-omap-dss2/linux into linux-fbdev/for-3.10-fixes 2013-05-29 17:00:34 +08:00
xen Main features: 2013-07-03 10:31:38 -07:00
Kbuild UAPI: remove empty Kbuild files 2013-04-30 17:04:09 -07:00