Re: [PATCH] slab: NUMA kmem_cache diet

From: Eric Dumazet
Date: Fri Mar 23 2007 - 03:46:21 EST


Pekka J Enberg a écrit :
(Please inline patches to the mail, makes it easier to review.)

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Eric Dumazet wrote:
Some NUMA machines have a big MAX_NUMNODES (possibly 1024), but fewer possible
nodes. This patch dynamically sizes the 'struct kmem_cache' to allocate only
needed space.

I moved nodelists[] field at the end of struct kmem_cache, and use the
following computation in kmem_cache_init()

Hmm, what seems bit worrying is:

diff --git a/mm/slab.c b/mm/slab.c
index abf46ae..b187618 100644
--- a/mm/slab.c
+++ b/mm/slab.c
@@ -389,7 +389,6 @@ struct kmem_cache {
unsigned int buffer_size;
u32 reciprocal_buffer_size;
/* 3) touched by every alloc & free from the backend */
- struct kmem_list3 *nodelists[MAX_NUMNODES];

I think nodelists is placed at the beginning of the struct for a reason. But I have no idea if it actually makes any difference...

It might make a difference if STATS is on, because freehit/freemiss might share a cache line with nodelists. Apart that, a kmem_cache struct is read_mostly : All changes are done outside of it, via array_cache or nodelists[].


Anyway slab STATS is already a SMP/NUMA nightmare because of cache line ping pongs. We might place STATS counter in a/some dedicated cache line(s)...

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/