[PATCH v5 0/8] kdump, vmcore: support mmap() on /proc/vmcore

From: HATAYAMA Daisuke
Date: Mon May 13 2013 - 21:57:14 EST


Currently, read to /proc/vmcore is done by read_oldmem() that uses
ioremap/iounmap per a single page. For example, if memory is 1GB,
ioremap/iounmap is called (1GB / 4KB)-times, that is, 262144
times. This causes big performance degradation.

In particular, the current main user of this mmap() is makedumpfile,
which not only reads memory from /proc/vmcore but also does other
processing like filtering, compression and IO work.

To address the issue, this patch implements mmap() on /proc/vmcore to
improve read performance.

Benchmark
=========

You can see two benchmarks on terabyte memory system. Both show about
40 seconds on 2TB system. This is almost equal to performance by
experimental kernel-side memory filtering.

- makedumpfile mmap() benchmark, by Jingbai Ma
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/3/27/19

- makedumpfile: benchmark on mmap() with /proc/vmcore on 2TB memory system
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/3/26/914

ChangeLog
=========

v4 => v5)

- Rebase 3.10-rc1.
- Introduce remap_vmalloc_range_partial() in order to remap vmalloc
memory in a part of vma area.
- Allocate buffer for ELF note segment at 2nd kernel by vmalloc(). Use
remap_vmalloc_range_partial() to remap the memory to userspace.

v3 => v4)

- Rebase 3.9-rc7.
- Drop clean-up patches orthogonal to the main topic of this patch set.
- Copy ELF note segments in the 2nd kernel just as in v1. Allocate
vmcore objects per pages. => See [PATCH 5/8]
- Map memory referenced by PT_LOAD entry directly even if the start or
end of the region doesn't fit inside page boundary, no longer copy
them as the previous v3. Then, holes, outside OS memory, are visible
from /proc/vmcore. => See [PATCH 7/8]

v2 => v3)

- Rebase 3.9-rc3.
- Copy program headers separately from e_phoff in ELF note segment
buffer. Now there's no risk to allocate huge memory if program
header table positions after memory segment.
- Add cleanup patch that removes unnecessary variable.
- Fix wrongly using the variable that is buffer size configurable at
runtime. Instead, use the variable that has original buffer size.

v1 => v2)

- Clean up the existing codes: use e_phoff, and remove the assumption
on PT_NOTE entries.
- Fix potential bug that ELF header size is not included in exported
vmcoreinfo size.
- Divide patch modifying read_vmcore() into two: clean-up and primary
code change.
- Put ELF note segments in page-size boundary on the 1st kernel
instead of copying them into the buffer on the 2nd kernel.

Test
====

This patch set is composed based on v3.10-rc1, tested on x86_64,
x86_32 both with 1GB and with 5GB (over 4GB) memory configurations.

---

HATAYAMA Daisuke (8):
vmcore: support mmap() on /proc/vmcore
vmcore: calculate vmcore file size from buffer size and total size of vmcore objects
vmcore: treat memory chunks referenced by PT_LOAD program header entries in page-size boundary in vmcore_list
vmcore: allocate ELF note segment in the 2nd kernel vmalloc memory
vmalloc: introduce remap_vmalloc_range_partial
vmalloc: make find_vm_area check in range
vmcore: clean up read_vmcore()
vmcore: allocate buffer for ELF headers on page-size alignment


fs/proc/vmcore.c | 491 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
include/linux/vmalloc.h | 4
mm/vmalloc.c | 65 ++++--
3 files changed, 386 insertions(+), 174 deletions(-)

--

Thanks.
HATAYAMA, Daisuke
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