RE: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19

[Adam Litke]

On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 12:51 -0800, Rohit Seth wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 12:58 -0600, Adam Litke wrote:
> 
> > I am currently working on an new approach to what you tried.  It
> > requires fewer changes to the kernel and implements the special large
> > page usage entirely in an LD_PRELOAD library.  And on newer kernels,
> > programs linked with the .x ldscript you mention above can run using all
> > small pages if not enough large pages are available.
> > 
> 
> Isn't it true that most of the times we'll need to be worrying about
> run-time allocation of memory (using malloc or such) as compared to
> static.

It really depends on the workload.  I've run HPC apps with 10+GB data
segments.  I've also worked with applications that would benefit from a
hugetlb-enabled morecore (glibc malloc/sbrk).  I'd like to see one
standard hugetlb preload library that handles every different "memory
object" we care about (static and dynamic).  That's what I'm working on
now.

> > For the curious, here's how this all works:
> > 1) Link the unmodified application source with a custom linker script which
> > does the following:
> >   - Align elf segments to large page boundaries
> >   - Assert a non-standard Elf program header flag (PF_LINUX_HTLB)
> >     to signal something (see below) to use large pages.
> 
> We'll need a similar flag for even code pages to start using hugetlb
> pages. In this case to keep the kernel changes to minimum, RTLD will
> need to modified.

Yes, I foresee the functionality currently in my preload lib to exist in
RTLD at some point way down the road.

> > 2) Boot a kernel that supports copy-on-write for PRIVATE hugetlb pages
> > 3) Use an LD_PRELOAD library which reloads the PF_LINUX_HTLB segments into
> > large pages and transfers control back to the application.
> > 
> 
> COW, swap etc. are all very nice (little!) features that make hugetlb to
> get used more transparently.

Indeed.  See my parallel post of a hugetlb-COW RFC :)

-- 
Adam Litke - (agl at us.ibm.com)
IBM Linux Technology Center

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