Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:44:01 +0800
From: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
To: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk>,
       "linux-mm@kvack.org" <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
       LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] HWPOISON: remove the unsafe __set_page_locked()
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On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 03:20:25AM +0800, Nick Piggin wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 06:47:39PM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> > > 
> > > And standard deviation is 0.04%, much larger than the difference 0.008% ..
> > 
> > Sorry that's not correct. I improved the accounting by treating
> > function0+function1 from two CPUs as an integral entity:
> > 
> >                  total time      add_to_page_cache_lru   percent  stddev
> >          before  3880166848.722  9683329.610             0.250%   0.014%
> >          after   3828516894.376  9778088.870             0.256%   0.012%
> >          delta                                           0.006%
> 
> I don't understand why you're doing this NFS workload to measure?

Because it is the first convenient workload hit my mind, and avoids
real disk IO :)

> I see significant nfs, networking protocol and device overheads in
> your profiles, also you're hitting some locks or something which
> is causing massive context switching. So I don't think this is a
> good test.

Yes there are overheads. However it is a real and common workload.

> But anyway as Hugh points out, you need to compare with a
> *completely* fixed kernel, which includes auditing all users of page
> flags non-atomically (slab, notably, but possibly also other
> places).

That's good point. We can do more benchmarks when more fixes are
available. However I suspect their design goal will be "fix them
without introducing noticeable overheads" :)

> One other thing to keep in mind that I will mention is that I am
> going to push in a patch to the page allocator to allow callers
> to avoid the refcounting (atomic_dec_and_test) in page lifetime,
> which is especially important for SLUB and takes more cycles off
> the page allocator...
>
> I don't know exactly what you're going to do after that to get a
> stable reference to slab pages. I guess you can read the page
> flags and speculatively take some slab locks and recheck etc...

For reliably we could skip page lock on zero refcounted pages.

We may lose the PG_hwpoison bit on races with __SetPageSlub*, however
it should be an acceptable imperfection.

Thanks,
Fengguang
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