[PATCH] Move accounting function calls out of critical vm code paths
In the 2.6.11 development cycle function calls have been added to lots of hot vm paths to do accounting. I think these should not go into the final 2.6.1 release because these statistics can be collected in a different way that does not require the updating of counters from frequently used vm code paths and is consistent with the methods use elsewhere in the kernel to obtain statistics. These function calls are acct_update_integrals -> Account for processes based on stime changes update_mem_hiwater -> takes rss and total_vm hiwater marks. acct_update_integrals is only useful to call if stime changes otherwise it will simply return. It is therefore best to relocate the function call to acct_update_integral into the function that updates stime which is account_system_time and remove it from the vm code paths. update_mem_hiwater finds the rss hiwater mark. We call that from timer context as well. This means that processes' high-water marks are now sampled statistically, at timer-interrupt time rather than deterministically. This may or may not be a problem.. This means that the rss limit is not always updated if rss is increased and thus not as accurate. But the benefit is that the rss checks do no pollute the vm paths and that it is consistent with the rss limit check. The following patch removes acct_update_integrals and update_mem_hiwater from the hot vm paths. Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com> From: Jay Lan <jlan@sgi.com> The new "move-accounting-function-calls-out-of-critical-vm-code-paths" patch in 2.6.11-rc3-mm2 was different from the code i tested. In particular, it mistakenly dropped the accounting routine calls in fs/exec.c. The calls in do_execve() are needed to properly initialize accounting fields. Specifically, the tsk->acct_stimexpd needs to be initialized to tsk->stime. I have discussed this with Christoph Lameter and he gave me full blessings to bring the calls back. Signed-off-by: Jay Lan <jlan@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment