• Christoph Lameter's avatar
    [PATCH] NUMA policies in the slab allocator V2 · dc85da15
    Christoph Lameter authored
    This patch fixes a regression in 2.6.14 against 2.6.13 that causes an
    imbalance in memory allocation during bootup.
    
    The slab allocator in 2.6.13 is not numa aware and simply calls
    alloc_pages().  This means that memory policies may control the behavior of
    alloc_pages().  During bootup the memory policy is set to MPOL_INTERLEAVE
    resulting in the spreading out of allocations during bootup over all
    available nodes.  The slab allocator in 2.6.13 has only a single list of
    slab pages.  As a result the per cpu slab cache and the spinlock controlled
    page lists may contain slab entries from off node memory.  The slab
    allocator in 2.6.13 makes no effort to discern the locality of an entry on
    its lists.
    
    The NUMA aware slab allocator in 2.6.14 controls locality of the slab pages
    explicitly by calling alloc_pages_node().  The NUMA slab allocator manages
    slab entries by having lists of available slab pages for each node.  The
    per cpu slab cache can only contain slab entries associated with the node
    local to the processor.  This guarantees that the default allocation mode
    of the slab allocator always assigns local memory if available.
    
    Setting MPOL_INTERLEAVE as a default policy during bootup has no effect
    anymore.  In 2.6.14 all node unspecific slab allocations are performed on
    the boot processor.  This means that most of key data structures are
    allocated on one node.  Most processors will have to refer to these
    structures making the boot node a potential bottleneck.  This may reduce
    performance and cause unnecessary memory pressure on the boot node.
    
    This patch implements NUMA policies in the slab layer.  There is the need
    of explicit application of NUMA memory policies by the slab allcator itself
    since the NUMA slab allocator does no longer let the page_allocator control
    locality.
    
    The check for policies is made directly at the beginning of __cache_alloc
    using current->mempolicy.  The memory policy is already frequently checked
    by the page allocator (alloc_page_vma() and alloc_page_current()).  So it
    is highly likely that the cacheline is present.  For MPOL_INTERLEAVE
    kmalloc() will spread out each request to one node after another so that an
    equal distribution of allocations can be obtained during bootup.
    
    It is not possible to push the policy check to lower layers of the NUMA
    slab allocator since the per cpu caches are now only containing slab
    entries from the current node.  If the policy says that the local node is
    not to be preferred or forbidden then there is no point in checking the
    slab cache or local list of slab pages.  The allocation better be directed
    immediately to the lists containing slab entries for the allowed set of
    nodes.
    
    This way of applying policy also fixes another strange behavior in 2.6.13.
    alloc_pages() is controlled by the memory allocation policy of the current
    process.  It could therefore be that one process is running with
    MPOL_INTERLEAVE and would f.e.  obtain a new page following that policy
    since no slab entries are in the lists anymore.  A page can typically be
    used for multiple slab entries but lets say that the current process is
    only using one.  The other entries are then added to the slab lists.  These
    are now non local entries in the slab lists despite of the possible
    availability of local pages that would provide faster access and increase
    the performance of the application.
    
    Another process without MPOL_INTERLEAVE may now run and expect a local slab
    entry from kmalloc().  However, there are still these free slab entries
    from the off node page obtained from the other process via MPOL_INTERLEAVE
    in the cache.  The process will then get an off node slab entry although
    other slab entries may be available that are local to that process.  This
    means that the policy if one process may contaminate the locality of the
    slab caches for other processes.
    
    This patch in effect insures that a per process policy is followed for the
    allocation of slab entries and that there cannot be a memory policy
    influence from one process to another.  A process with default policy will
    always get a local slab entry if one is available.  And the process using
    memory policies will get its memory arranged as requested.  Off-node slab
    allocation will require the use of spinlocks and will make the use of per
    cpu caches not possible.  A process using memory policies to redirect
    allocations offnode will have to cope with additional lock overhead in
    addition to the latency added by the need to access a remote slab entry.
    
    Changes V1->V2
    - Remove #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA by moving forward declaration into
      prior #ifdef CONFIG_NUMA section.
    
    - Give the function determining the node number to use a saner
      name.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChristoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    dc85da15
slab.c 95.4 KB