Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, David S. Miller wrote:
> >
> > Of course, if you can actually measure it, that would be
> > interesting. Naive math gives you a guess for the order of
> > magnitude effect, but nothing beats real numbers ;)
> >
> > The SYSV folks actually did have a buddy allocator a long time ago and
> > they did implement lazy coalescing because is supposedly improved
> > performance.
>
> I bet that is mainly because of CPU scalability, and being able to avoid
> touching the buddy lists from multiple CPU's - the same reason _we_ have
> the per-CPU front-ends on various allocators.
>
> I doubt it is because buddy matters past the 4MB mark. I just can't see
> how you can avoid the naive math which says that it should be 1/512th as
> common to coalesce to 4MB as it is to coalesce to 8kB.
Buddy costs tend to be down in the noise compared with the cost
of the zone->lock.
I did a per-cpu pages patch a while back which, when it takes that
lock, grabs 16 pages or frees 16 pages. Anton tested it on the
12-way: http://samba.org/~anton/linux/2.5.9/ blue -> purple
The cost of rmqueue() and __free_pages_ok went from 13% of system
time down to 2%. So that 2% speedup is all that's available by fiddling
with the buddy algorithm (I think). And I bet most of that is still taking
the lock.
Didn't submit the patch because I think a per-cpu page buffer is a bit of
a dopey cop-out. I have patches here which make most of the page-intensive
fastpaths in the kernel stop using single pages and start using 16-page batches.
That will make a 16-page allocation request just a natural thing
to do. But we will need a per-cpu buffer to wring the last drops
out of anonymous pagefaults and generic_file_write(), which do not
lend themselves to gang allocation.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 07 2002 - 22:00:18 EST