2012/1/1 Michal Nazarewicz [off-list ref]:

quoted

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 2:39 PM, Marek Szyprowski
[off-list ref] wrote:

...

On Sun, 01 Jan 2012 08:49:13 +0100, Gilad Ben-Yossef [off-list ref]
wrote:

quoted

Please consider whether sending an IPI to all processors in the system
and interrupting them is appropriate here.

You seem to assume that it is probable that each CPU of the possibly
4,096 (MAXSMP on x86) has a per-cpu page for the specified zone,

I'm not really assuming that (in fact I expect what you fear, ie. that
most CPUs won't have pages from specified zone an PCP list), however,
I really need to make sure to get them off all PCP lists.

True, the question is whether or not you have to send a global IPI to do that.

quoted

otherwise you're just interrupting them out of doing something useful,
or save power idle for nothing.

Exactly what's happening now anyway.

Indeed.

quoted

While that may or may not be a reasonable assumption for the general
drain_all_pages that drains pcps from all zones, I feel it is less
likely to be the right thing once you limit the drain to a single
zone.

Currently, set_migratetype_isolate() seem to do more then it needs to,
ie. it drains all the pages even though all it cares about is a single

zone.

I agree your patch is better then current state. I just did want to add
yet another global IPI I'll have to chase afterwards.. :-)

quoted

Some background on my attempt to reduce "IPI noise" in the system in
this context is probably useful here as
well: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/22/133

Looks interesting, I'm not entirely sure why it does not end up a race
condition, but in case of __zone_drain_all_pages() we already hold

If a page is in the PCP list when we check, you'll send the IPI and all is well.

If it isn't when we check and gets added later you could just the same have
situation where we send the IPI, try to do try an empty PCP list and then
the page gets added. So we are not adding a race condition that is not there
already :-)

zone->lock, so my fears are somehow gone.. ?I'll give it a try, and prepare
a patch for __zone_drain_all_pages().

I plan to send V5 of the IPI noise patch after some testing. It has a new
version of the drain_all_pages, with no allocation in the reclaim path
and no locking. You might want to wait till that one is out to base on it.


Thank you for considering my feedback :-)

Gilad


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Gilad Ben-Yossef
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gilad at benyossef.com
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"Unfortunately, cache misses are an equal opportunity pain provider."
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