Re: [RFC 00/15] mm: Implement Slab Movable Objects (SMO)

[Roman Gushchin]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2019 at 03:14:11PM +1100, Tobin C. Harding wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Here is a patch set implementing movable objects within the SLUB
> allocator.  This is work based on Christopher's patch set:
> 
>  https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/project/lkml/list/?series=377335
> 
> The original code logic is from that set and implemented by Christopher.
> Clean up, refactoring, documentation, and additional features by myself.
> Blame for any bugs remaining falls solely with myself.  Patches using
> Christopher's code use the Co-developed-by tag.
> 
> After movable objects are implemented a number of useful features become
> possible.  Some of these are implemented in this series, including:
> 
>  - Cache defragmentation.	   
> 
>     Currently the SLUB allocator is susceptible to internal
>     fragmentation.  This occurs when a large number of cached objects
>     are allocated and then freed in an arbitrary order.  As the cache
>     fragments the number of pages used by the partial slabs list
>     increases.  This wastes memory.
> 
>     Patch set implements the machinery to facilitate conditional cache
>     defragmentation (via kmem_cache_defrag()) and unconditional
>     defragmentation (via kmem_cache_shrink()).  Various sysfs knobs are
>     provided to interact with and configure this.
> 
>     Patch set implements movable objects and cache defragmentation for
>     the XArray.
> 
>  - Moving objects to and from a specific NUMA node.
> 
>  - Balancing objects across all NUMA nodes.
> 
> We add a test module to facilitate playing around with movable objects
> and a python test suite that uses the module.
> 
> Everything except the NUMA stuff was tested on bare metal, the NUMA
> stuff was tested with Qemu NUMA emulation.
> 
> Possible further work:
> 
> 1. Implementing movable objects for the inode and dentry caches.
> 
> 2. Tying into the page migration and page defragmentation logic so that
>    so far unmovable pages that are in the way of creating a contiguous
>    block of memory will become movable.  This would mean checking for
>    slab pages in the migration logic and calling slab to see if it can
>    move the page by migrating all objects.


Hi Tobin!

Very interesting and promising patchset! Looking forward for inode/dentry
moving support, might be a big deal for allocating huge pages dynamically.

Thanks!