[PATCH 0/2] ksm: take dirty bit as reference to avoid volatile pages

From: Nai Xia
Date: Mon Mar 28 2011 - 10:14:46 EST


Currently, ksm uses page checksum to detect volatile pages. Izik Eidus
suggested that we could use pte dirty bit to optimize. This patch series
adds this new logic.

Preliminary benchmarks show that the scan speed is improved by up to 16
times on volatile transparent huge pages and up to 8 times on volatile
regular pages.

Following is the test program to show this top speed up (you need to make
ksmd takes about more than 90% of the cpu and watch the ksm/full_scans).

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>

#define MADV_MERGEABLE 12


#define SIZE (2000*1024*1024)
#define PAGE_SIZE 4096

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
unsigned char *p;
int j;
int ret;

p = mmap(NULL, SIZE, PROT_WRITE|PROT_READ,
MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, 0, 0);

if (p == MAP_FAILED) {
printf("mmap error\n");
return 0;
}

ret = madvise(p, SIZE, MADV_MERGEABLE);

if (ret==-1) {
printf("madvise failed \n");
return 0;
}


memset(p, 1, SIZE);

while (1) {
for (j=0; j<SIZE; j+=PAGE_SIZE) {
*((long*)(p+j+PAGE_SIZE-4)) = random();
}
}

return 0;
}
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