summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt
Commit message (Collapse)AuthorAgeFilesLines
* ksm: add some commentsHugh Dickins2013-02-231-4/+12
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Added slightly more detail to the Documentation of merge_across_nodes, a few comments in areas indicated by review, and renamed get_ksm_page()'s argument from "locked" to "lock_it". No functional change. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Petr Holasek <pholasek@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Izik Eidus <izik.eidus@ravellosystems.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
* ksm: allow trees per NUMA nodePetr Holasek2013-02-231-0/+7
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Here's a KSM series, based on mmotm 2013-01-23-17-04: starting with Petr's v7 "KSM: numa awareness sysfs knob"; then fixing the two issues we had with that, fully enabling KSM page migration on the way. (A different kind of KSM/NUMA issue which I've certainly not begun to address here: when KSM pages are unmerged, there's usually no sense in preferring to allocate the new pages local to the caller's node.) This patch: Introduces new sysfs boolean knob /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/merge_across_nodes which control merging pages across different numa nodes. When it is set to zero only pages from the same node are merged, otherwise pages from all nodes can be merged together (default behavior). Typical use-case could be a lot of KVM guests on NUMA machine and cpus from more distant nodes would have significant increase of access latency to the merged ksm page. Sysfs knob was choosen for higher variability when some users still prefers higher amount of saved physical memory regardless of access latency. Every numa node has its own stable & unstable trees because of faster searching and inserting. Changing of merge_across_nodes value is possible only when there are not any ksm shared pages in system. I've tested this patch on numa machines with 2, 4 and 8 nodes and measured speed of memory access inside of KVM guests with memory pinned to one of nodes with this benchmark: http://pholasek.fedorapeople.org/alloc_pg.c Population standard deviations of access times in percentage of average were following: merge_across_nodes=1 2 nodes 1.4% 4 nodes 1.6% 8 nodes 1.7% merge_across_nodes=0 2 nodes 1% 4 nodes 0.32% 8 nodes 0.018% RFC: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/30/91 v1: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/23/46 v2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/6/29/105 v3: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/14/550 v4: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/9/23/137 v5: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/10/540 v6: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/154 v7: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/27/225 Hugh notes that this patch brings two problems, whose solution needs further support in mm/ksm.c, which follows in subsequent patches: 1) switching merge_across_nodes after running KSM is liable to oops on stale nodes still left over from the previous stable tree; 2) memory hotremove may migrate KSM pages, but there is no provision here for !merge_across_nodes to migrate nodes to the proper tree. Signed-off-by: Petr Holasek <pholasek@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Izik Eidus <izik.eidus@ravellosystems.com> Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@de.ibm.com> Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
* ksm: remove unswappable max_kernel_pagesHugh Dickins2009-12-151-15/+7
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Now that ksm pages are swappable, and the known holes plugged, remove mention of unswappable kernel pages from KSM documentation and comments. Remove the totalram_pages/4 initialization of max_kernel_pages. In fact, remove max_kernel_pages altogether - we can reinstate it if removal turns out to break someone's script; but if we later want to limit KSM's memory usage, limiting the stable nodes would not be an effective approach. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk> Cc: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
* ksm: more on default valuesHugh Dickins2009-10-081-6/+7
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Adjust the max_kernel_pages default to a quarter of totalram_pages, instead of nr_free_buffer_pages() / 4: the KSM pages themselves come from highmem, and even on a 16GB PAE machine, 4GB of KSM pages would only be pinning 32MB of lowmem with their rmap_items, so no need for the more obscure calculation (nor for its own special init function). There is no way for the user to switch KSM on if CONFIG_SYSFS is not enabled, so in that case default run to KSM_RUN_MERGE. Update KSM Documentation and Kconfig to reflect the new defaults. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk> Cc: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
* ksm: add some documentationHugh Dickins2009-09-221-0/+89
Add Documentation/vm/ksm.txt: how to use the Kernel Samepage Merging feature Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh.dickins@tiscali.co.uk> Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com> Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com> Acked-by: Izik Eidus <ieidus@redhat.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>