The main features of 2.2.18pre21aa2 are:
o Support for 4Gigabyte of RAM on IA32 (me and Gerhard Wichert)
o Support for 2T of RAM on alpha (me)
o Improved VM (VM-global) for high end machines with enough ram and doing
heavy I/O under high memory pressure plus fixes for the MAP_SHARED oom
by removing kpiod plus fixes for race conditions in GFP. (me)
o RAW-IO (doable with bigmem enabled too). Several fixes are been
included mainly from me and two subtle ones from Eric Lowe and this last
version of the patch should be finally work stable.
(original patch from Stephen C. Tweedie)
o SMP scheduler improvements. (me and partly from 2.3.x contributed by
Ingo Molnar)
o LFS (>2G file on 32bit architectures) also NFSv3 works over 2G
(nfsv3-lfs work from me, Andi and fix from Jay Weber)
o wake-one LIFO in accept(2), it's going to be a wake-three,
but it's much better anyways since if it's wake-three then right now
it's wake-all * 3 ;). Apache must be compiled with
-DSINGLE_LISTEN_UNSERIALIZED_ACCEPT to take advantage of that. (me)
o lowlatency and SMP scalability in all copy-user and tcp_sendmsg
checksum.
o GFS support.
o various fixes
Detailed description of 2.2.18pre21aa2 follows.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
00_4_min_percent-1
Increase the min percent of the buffer cache and page cache to 4%.
(it wouldn't matter if the VM algorithms were better). (me)
00_IO-wait-2.gz
Avoid suprious unplug of the I/O queue. (me)
00_K7_P4-cachelines-2
Allows the kernel to be compiled for K7 (AMD Athlon) or Pentium4.
This compilations options _only_ make the kernel to assume respectively
64byte cachelines or 128byte cachelines.
Those assumptions are critical mostly on SMP systems, but even UP will
take advantage of it because it will make most performance
critical slab allocations to start on a cacheline boundary.
Since the only difference between Ppro/K7/P4 compilations
is the cacheline size assumed by the kernel you can safely boot
a K7/P4 compiled kernel on a Ppro, it won't obviously generate
cacheline pinpongs in SMP. There are only two downsides in
running on a Ppro (PII/PIII included) a K7/P4 compiled kernel:
1) some byte of memory wasted due the larger paddings (really not
a big deal)
2) potential waste of cacheline sets. On PII and PIII and PPro
the L1 dcache is 8kbyte or 16kbytes 2-way set associative (so
there are 128 or 256 sets of cachelines) and by stressing the
first 32bytes of the 128 byte aligned data structures (for
example if the kernel is compiled for P4) you would take
advantage of only 1/4 of the available L1 cache. (you would
stress set 0, 4, 8, ... only) This is probably quite serious
issue in terms of performance. So for Ppro/PII/PIII you're
still suggested to use Ppro compilation option (if care to
optimize the L1 cache usage).
(me and Andi)
00_P4-spinlocks-rep-nop-doug-1
Change the spinlock code to be optimized for P4. (Doug Ledford)
00_PIII-6.bz2
SSE/SSE2 support (unmasked exception via mxcsr included).
(mix of Doug Ledford, Ingo Molnar, Gabriel Paubert PIII patch for
2.2.x and 2.4.x PIII support from Gareth Hughes, audited, fixed and
changed by me to be dynamic. At the end it's very similar to the
2.4.x support)
Kernel now understands the `nofxsr' boot time parameter and it
doesn't enable fxsr in that case (if there's any CPU that
crashes at boot because it's buggy, nofxsr will workaround
the hardware bug; it's also useful for asymetric multiprocessing
where boot cpu can have fxsr capabilities and the other cpus hasn't)
00_SIGIO-reason-1
Pass the reason for the sigio in the si_code (and a duplicate info
in si_band) with the same API of 2.4.x. This avoids people
having to poll a set of fd during the sigio handler. (current
2.4.x has two bugs in that area but fixes are in Linus's mailbox)
00_SMP-scheduler-2.2.18pre21-H.bz2
Better SMP reschedule_idle. (partly backported from 2.3.x, 2.3.x
version was contributed by Ingo Molnar)
Fixes the wmb() in schedule_tail that should really be a mb(), in
theory one of the last reads in reschedule_idle could return garbage (in
practice I think it can't trigger... at least on x86 :) (me)
00_VM_RESERVED-1
Allows device drivers to set the VMA as reserved to avoid swap_out to
try to unmap stuff from them (this avoid device drivers using ->nopage
for lazily mapping scatter gather dma areas in userspace, to implement
a noop swapout and it also avoids useless page faults). This is much
more efficient than setting the physical pages as reserved.
00_account-failed-buffer-tries-1
Account also the failed buffer tries during shrink_mmap. (me)
(this is included in the VM-global that I maintain against vanilla
2.2.x btw)
00_alpha-epoch-2
Fixes the RTC parsing done by the kernel at boot. (backported from
2.4.x)
00_alpha-read-unlock-SMP-race-1
SMP race fix in the read_unlock implementation of alpha. (me)
00_buf-run_task_queue.gz
Avoid a suprious useless unplug of the I/O queue. (me)
00_dcache-aging-1
Introduce aging in the dcache recycling. (me)
00_delack-timer-5.gz
Additional paranoid stuff in TCP delayed acks code (if somebody
can still reproduce lockups under heavy TCP load, the
delack-timer-5 patch can be the solution). In 2.2.15 only what
was obviously wrong is been fixed, but at the time I did
delack-timer-5 I was convinced the stuff in 2.2.15 _might_ not be
enough, so if you have still lockups under 2.2.15 let us know.
delack-timer-5 is reported to definitely fix the TCP lockup. (me)
00_elv-merging-1
Fix elevator merging when tasks blocks waiting for new requests. (me)
00_ide-probe-compile-1
Declare rtc_lock external spinlock to fix compilation. (me)
00_inode-boot-dynamic-2
Make the inode-max and ihash dynamic. Mean distribution in the
hash is of 1. inode-max remains the same until 256M of ram.
It then reaches 32k inodes with 512Mbyte of ram and 64k inodes
with 1G of ram and then it stops growing. It's true dcache
avoids most of the iget when everything fits in the working set,
but as soon there's icache pollution iget will run all the time
so it's not true iget hash table doesn't matter for performance.
The ihash hasnfn is very bad in both 2.2.x and 2.4.x:
unsigned long tmp = i_ino | (unsigned long) sb;
Think what happens if `sb' has many bits set to 1, it will generate an
huge collision chain. It should have been at least an xor, not an or.
So I changed it this way:
unsigned long tmp = i_ino + (unsigned long) sb / (sizeof(struct super_block) & ~(sizeof(struct super_block) - 1));
This will shift right sb with around `super_block size' granularity
and it will share hash cachelines if the user asks for consecutive
inode numbers (can be the case).
(me)
00_inode-cleanup-3.gz
Minor inode stuff cleanedup. (me)
00_java-proc.gz
Revertd the semantic change that make differences between
/proc/00000$$ and /proc/$$, this allows backwards compatibilty of
a misfeature and it _won't_ hurt security. There's no downside
in reverting the 2.2.13 semantic change.
00_kupdate-sigstop-2.2.11-1.gz
Allows kupdate to be stopped via SIGSTOP (currently it must be
stopped by setting interval to zero via sysctl). This returns
useful in the airplane where you do killall -STOP
kupdate... STOP kupdate at your own risk of course ;) (me)
00_lockd-memleak-trond-1
Fix posted on l-k to remove some memleak in lockd code. (Trond
Myklebust)
00_loop-merging-instead-of-async-1
Instead of making a single threaded async daemon to avoid unplugging
the queue all the time, the blockdevice code is been changed
to allow the loop device to handle merged requests. (me)
00_mremap-waste-virtual-stack-space-1.gz
Avoids mremap to grow in virtual addresses (and so in turn
it avoids to waste virtual address space).
00_nanosleep-4.gz
Provide nanosleep usec resolution so that a signal flood doesn't
hang glibc folks that correctly trust the rem field to resume
the nanosleep after a syscall interruption. (without the patch
nanosleep resolution is instead 10msec on IA32 and around 1msec on
alpha) (me)
00_overcommit-1.gz
Make sure to not understimate the available memory (the cache and
buffers may be under the min percent) (me)
00_parent-timeslice-loss-fix-1
If child exists _before_ it got the timeslice refresh parents
gets its timeslice back. 2.4.x does that even if child got
the refresh and it's wrong.
This feature avoids programs like `bash scripts' to be starved while
forking short-lived childs at high frequency.
(me)
00_silent-stack-overflow-5.gz
Avoid stack to silenty overflow on the heap (make life easier
to track down userspace issues). Perfect approch is not possible
even using special LDT for the stack segment. The approch in the
patch will work 99% of the time and it enforces a GAP between heap
and stack of 1 page as default (configurable via sysctl, if
turned to zero the feature is disabled completly). (me)
00_tsc-calibration-non-compile-time-1.gz
TSC calibration must be dynamic and not a compile time thing
because gettimeofday is dynamic and it depends on the TSCs
to be in sync. (me)
00_version
Change to the Makefile EXTRAVERSION.
00_wake-one-1
Wake one in accept(2). (me)
05_string-io-ops-doug-1
Use only ordered string operations while writing to IOMMU areas.
the non __ versions can be reordered at compile time. (Doug Ledford)
10_bigmem-2.2.18pre19-19.bz2
BIGMEM production code (IA32 and alpha). This one fixes
a memory leak during swap (almost unreproducibe, found it
while reading the sources only) and some alpha-bigmem
bug. It's now possible to generate core dumps larger
than 2G (the previous limitation was due a few ext2
bugs and a binfmt_elf.c bug that need to be fixed in 2.4.x too).
I just includes the large_shm patch so it should be possible to
allocate more than 2g in one shm segment. (me and Gerhard Wichert)
Includes >4G mtrr support developed by Boszormenyi Zoltan.
Recently fixed sysinfo structure to be defined as:
char _f[22-3*sizeof(long)+sizeof(short)];
so that sysinfo(2) doesn't overflow the user buffer on 64bit platforms.
Also 2.4.x is buggy in that respect and needs to be fixed, btw.
13_bigmem-rawio-2.2.18pre21aa2-6.bz2
SCT's rawio bigmem capable. (Stephen C. Tweedie)
14_bigmem-rawio-lvm-2.2.18pre17aa1-7.bz2
LVM compatible with the 2.3.x one. (Heinz Mauelshagen)
30_rtclight-2.2.15pre13aa1-1.gz
Needed by alpha SMP. (won't be needed anymore in 2.4.x)
40_lfs-2.2.18pre21aa1-19.bz2
LFS: >2G file support for 32bit archs. This also includes
the new getdents64 and fcntl64 syscalls in sync with the
2.4.x user<-> kernel API. It also fixes some bug
present in the previous 2.2.x LFS patches. Support for
nfsv3 is complete as well on both server and client side.
41_nlm_host_trond-1
2.4.x fixes (wasn't yet merged in 2.4.x mainstream) for nlm host
and statd from Trond. (suggested by Andi and backported to 2.2.x by me)
50_robust-initrd-3
Relocate the initrd image ASAP (btw, on alpha `ASAP' happens sooner
than on IA32 due kseg), to avoid corrupting it while allocating the
boot memory (like the mem_map_t array). This is good for robusteness
and it's mainly interesting when bigmem is enabled.
60_VM-global-2.2.18pre18aa1-7.bz2
Kills kpiod removing the OOM while paging out MAP_SHARED
segments during a low memory condition. Fixes
mmap00[123] on 8mbyte of RAM, and I bet I fixes as well
Alan's DBMS OOM troubles. The way I could remove
kpiod is to add a per-process fs_locks information
and to check that information instead of deadlocking
into the semaphore or into the superblock lock.
Fixes in a alternate (more efficient) way the GFP race that
is currently handled by the free_before_allocate logic.
The alternate way is to have a per-process freelist
and to refill the global queue only once the tasks
allocate something for itself.
Accounts protected buffers as unfreeable (fixes
OOM with big ramdisk in memory).
Rewrite the sync_page_buffers logic. Now it's a per-bh
bitflag information that tell us if a dirty buffer is hanging
around for a too long time w/o becoming freeable (so we block
on such buffer only once necessary and never when
there's no high pressure). If there's no high pressure and
__GFP_IO is set we try to write with WRITEA that doesn't block
but that allows us to fill the I/O queue with the
less interesting buffers in the VM. Never waits on the
buffer to become unlocked (that's too aggressive and that was
necessary only to workaround the pagingout of MAP_SHARED segments
that wasn't able to do proper write throttling due the always
async kpiod).
Rewrite the async buffer flushing wakeup points ala 2.4.x way.
Avoids swain/swapout while writing heavily to disk (no-swapout).
Adds lowlatency checkpoints in shrink_mmap and swap_out.
The same VM-global-patch backported to clean 2.2.18pre21 is
here (the only difference is that it includes the above
account-buffer-tries and it doesn't remove the suprious
tq_disk run during readahead that isn't a VM related change):
ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/patches/v2.2/2.2.18pre18/VM-global-2.2.18pre18-7.bz2
70_cond-sched-1
Implements conditional_schedule(). (Ingo Molnar from lowlatency patch)
71_copy-user-reschedule-3
Add low latency schedule entry points into the copy_user(), this fixes
read(2)/write(2) hangs. (Originally implemented by Ingo Molnar
in the lowlatency patch, but this patch is not equivalent, it's
a very subset and it's different: the reason I put the
conditional schedule _after_ the copy is because we want the
higher timeslice possible once we return to userspace to avoid
live locks during swap)
72_copy-user-unlock-1
Drop the big kernel lock during copy-user that can release
it anyways while getting faults. Improves SMP scalability. (me)
73_cksum-user-unlock-2
Drop big kernel lock during TCP checksum (in tcp_sendmsg). Receiver
side can't drop the big lock as it doesn't have a process context. (me)
74_copy-user-unlock-alpha-1
Same as above for alpha architecture.
75_unlock-ppc-sparc-sparc64-1
Same as above for ppc, sparc, sparc64 architectures.
80_smp-locking-1
Fix implementation bugs in spinlocks and other SMP atomic operations
that needs to declare "memory" as clobbered. Didn't removed the
__dummy structures in 2.2.x to make sure not to trigger any compiler
issue. (me)
90_NMI-watchdog-dynamic-1
NMI wathdog is compiled in without configuration options.
It's disabled by default. To enable it dynamically at boot
pass the kernel the parameter "nmi_irq=0". nmi_irq=0 makes sense
on SMP only. (original patch from Ingo Molnar, fixed to work again in
late 2.2.x kernels and made it dynamic by me)
95_GFS-00_bufcache.patch-1
Add hooks in the buffer head that GFS needs.
95_GFS-01_cdb16.patch-1
make scsi command length dynamic (max 16) instead of fixed to 12.
(needed by GFS)
95_GFS-02_exportscsi.patch-1
export rscsi_disks structure from sd.c for GFS. Note the equivalent
patch in GFS latest release is buggy and I had to fix it up to allow
sd_mod to be compied correctly. (just reported to GFS folks)
95_GFS-03_flock.patch-1
Calls lowlevel f_ops->lock also from flock (not only from
fcntl(F_*K)). needed by GFS.
95_GFS-04_ksyms.patch-1
Export a few kernel functions for GFS module. (This was buggy
too in the GFS latest release and it's just reported and fixed here)
95_GFS-05_pool_name.patch-1
Added device_names to generic disk structure (for GFS).
95_GFS-06_sparc64_ioctl.patch-1
Added few ioctl to sparc64 32bit ioctl wrapper for GFS.
95_GFS-07_stomith_x10_cm11a.patch-1
Export change_termios to modules (for GFS).
95_GFS-08_task.patch-1
Added fs_transaction field to the task structure (for GFS).
95_GFS-09_generic_map.patch-1
Added generic map_fn/request_fn to ll_rw_block. The interface with
MD and LVM got broken so it had to be fixed too. (for GFS).
95_GFS-10_pipe-fix-and-gfs-soft-inode-1
Insert the GFS inode in the inode structure.
GFS uses same inode for named pipes/unix sockets and
GFS itself, so left some space before putting generic_ip pointer
in the gfs_inode_info.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 2.2.18pre21aa2 patch is here:
ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.2/2.2.18pre21aa2.bz2
As usual all the separate patches are in:
ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/kernels/v2.2/2.2.18pre21aa2/
and they can be applyed in `ls` order to generate the 2.2.18pre21aa2
kernel.
Andrea
PS. If you'll run with more than 4giga of RAM on alpha, you'll need also
to fix procps if you want to read the correct MM values with `free`, `top`
and `vmstat`. procps takes all the memory information with byte
granularity in `int` words (and not long words). I fixed procps this way:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/andrea/procps/procps-2.0.2-bigmem-1.gz