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Claudio Imbrenda authored
Some architectures have a set of zero pages (coloured zero pages) instead of only one zero page, in order to improve the cache performance. In those cases, the kernel samepage merger (KSM) would merge all the allocated pages that happen to be filled with zeroes to the same deduplicated page, thus losing all the advantages of coloured zero pages. This behaviour is noticeable when a process accesses large arrays of allocated pages containing zeroes. A test I conducted on s390 shows that there is a speed penalty when KSM merges such pages, compared to not merging them or using actual zero pages from the start without breaking the COW. This patch fixes this behaviour. When coloured zero pages are present, the checksum of a zero page is calculated during initialisation, and compared with the checksum of the current canditate during merging. In case of a match, the normal merging routine is used to merge the page with the correct coloured zero page, which ensures the candidate page is checked to be equal to the target zero page. A sysfs entry is also added to toggle this behaviour, since it can potentially introduce performance regressions, especially on architectures without coloured zero pages. The default value is disabled, for backwards compatibility. With this patch, the performance with KSM is the same as with non COW-broken actual zero pages, which is also the same as without KSM. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: make zero_checksum and ksm_use_zero_pages __read_mostly, per Andrea] [imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com: documentation for coloured zero pages deduplication] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1484927522-1964-1-git-send-email-imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1484850953-23941-1-git-send-email-imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.comSigned-off-by:
Claudio Imbrenda <imbrenda@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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