Message-ID: <41787840.3060807@yahoo.com.au>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:02:24 +1000
From: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
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To: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@novell.com>
CC: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ZONE_PADDING wastes 4 bytes of the new cacheline
References: <20041021011714.GQ24619@dualathlon.random> <417728B0.3070006@yahoo.com.au> <20041020213622.77afdd4a.akpm@osdl.org> <417837A7.8010908@yahoo.com.au> <20041021224533.GB8756@dualathlon.random> <41785585.6030809@yahoo.com.au> <20041022011057.GC14325@dualathlon.random>
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Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 10:34:13AM +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
>>Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>>
>>
>>>looks reasonable. only cons is that this rejects on my tree ;), pages_*
>>>and protection is gone in my tree, replaced by watermarks[] using the
>>>very same optimal and proven algo of 2.4 (enabled by default of course).
>>>I'll reevaluate the false sharing later on.
>>>
>>
>>May I again ask what you think is wrong with ->protection[] apart from
>>it being turned off by default? (I don't think our previous conversation
>>ever reached a conclusion...)
> 
> 
> the API is flawed, how can set it up by default? if somebody tweaks
> pages_min it get screwed.
> 

The setup code leaves a bit to be desired, but for the purpose of
kswapd and the page allocator they are fine.

> plus it's worthless to have pages_min/low/high and protection[] when you
> can combine the two things together. those pages_min/low/high and
> protection combined when protection itself is calculated in function of
> pages_min/low/high just creates confusion. I believe this comments
> explains it well enough:
> 

I don't agree, there are times when you need to know the bare pages_xxx
watermark, and times when you need to know the whole ->protection thing.

> /*
>  * setup_per_zone_protection - called whenver min_free_kbytes or
>  *	sysctl_lower_zone_protection changes.  Ensures that each zone
>  *	has a correct pages_protected value, so an adequate number of
>  *	pages are left in the zone after a successful __alloc_pages().
>  *
>  *	This algorithm is way confusing.  I tries to keep the same
> 	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>  *	behavior
>  *	as we had with the incremental min iterative algorithm.
>  */
> 
> I've to agree with the comment, if I've to start doing math on top of
> this algorithm, it's almost faster to replace it with the 2.4 one that
> has clear semantics.
> 
> Example of the runtime behavaiour of the very well understood
> lowmem_reserve from 2.4, it's easier to make an example than to explain
> it with words:
> 
> 	1G machine -> (16M dma, 800M-16M normal, 1G-800M high)
> 	1G machine -> (16M dma, 784M normal, 224M high)
> 
> sysctl defaults are:
> 
> int sysctl_lower_zone_reserve_ratio[MAX_NR_ZONES-1] = { 256, 32 };
> 
> the results will be:
> 
> 1) NORMAL allocation will leave 784M/256 of ram reserved in the ZONE_DMA
> 
> 2) HIGHMEM allocation will leave 224M/32 of ram reserved in ZONE_NORMAL
> 
> 3) HIGHMEM allocation will (224M+784M)/256 of ram reserved in ZONE_DMA
> 
> I invented this algorithm to scale in all machines and to make the
> memory reservation not noticeable and only beneficial. With this API is
> trivial to tune and to understand what will happen, the default value
> looks good and they're proven by years of production in 2.4. Most
> important: it's only in function of the sizes of the zones, the
> pages_min levels have nothing to do with it.
> 

OK I dont disagree that your setup calculations are much nicer, and
the current ones are pretty broken...

> I'm still unsure if the 2.6 lower_zone_protection completely mimics the
> 2.4 lowmem_zone_reserve algorithm if tuned by reversing the pages_min
> settings accordingly, but I believe it's easier to drop it and replace
> with a clear understandable API that as well drops the pages_min levels
> that have no reason to exists anymore, than to leave it in its current
> state and to start reversing pages_min algorithm to tune it from
> userspace (in the hope nobody could ever tweak pages_min calculation in
> the kernel, to avoid breaking the userspace that would require
> kernel-internal knowledge to have a chance to tune lowmem_protection
> from a rc.d script).
> 

But please no wholesale replacement of the ->pages_xxx / ->protection
thing unless you really show it is needed (which I'm pretty sure it
isn't). alloc_pages is very nice right now ;)
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