From 3e0d98b9f1eb757fc98efc84e74e54a08308aa73 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Paul Jackson Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 01:01:49 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] cpuset: memory pressure meter Provide a simple per-cpuset metric of memory pressure, tracking the -rate- that the tasks in a cpuset call try_to_free_pages(), the synchronous (direct) memory reclaim code. This enables batch managers monitoring jobs running in dedicated cpusets to efficiently detect what level of memory pressure that job is causing. This is useful both on tightly managed systems running a wide mix of submitted jobs, which may choose to terminate or reprioritize jobs that are trying to use more memory than allowed on the nodes assigned them, and with tightly coupled, long running, massively parallel scientific computing jobs that will dramatically fail to meet required performance goals if they start to use more memory than allowed to them. This patch just provides a very economical way for the batch manager to monitor a cpuset for signs of memory pressure. It's up to the batch manager or other user code to decide what to do about it and take action. ==> Unless this feature is enabled by writing "1" to the special file /dev/cpuset/memory_pressure_enabled, the hook in the rebalance code of __alloc_pages() for this metric reduces to simply noticing that the cpuset_memory_pressure_enabled flag is zero. So only systems that enable this feature will compute the metric. Why a per-cpuset, running average: Because this meter is per-cpuset, rather than per-task or mm, the system load imposed by a batch scheduler monitoring this metric is sharply reduced on large systems, because a scan of the tasklist can be avoided on each set of queries. Because this meter is a running average, instead of an accumulating counter, a batch scheduler can detect memory pressure with a single read, instead of having to read and accumulate results for a period of time. Because this meter is per-cpuset rather than per-task or mm, the batch scheduler can obtain the key information, memory pressure in a cpuset, with a single read, rather than having to query and accumulate results over all the (dynamically changing) set of tasks in the cpuset. A per-cpuset simple digital filter (requires a spinlock and 3 words of data per-cpuset) is kept, and updated by any task attached to that cpuset, if it enters the synchronous (direct) page reclaim code. A per-cpuset file provides an integer number representing the recent (half-life of 10 seconds) rate of direct page reclaims caused by the tasks in the cpuset, in units of reclaims attempted per second, times 1000. Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/page_alloc.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) (limited to 'mm') diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c index ad3d0202cdef..e0e84924171b 100644 --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -976,6 +976,7 @@ rebalance: cond_resched(); /* We now go into synchronous reclaim */ + cpuset_memory_pressure_bump(); p->flags |= PF_MEMALLOC; reclaim_state.reclaimed_slab = 0; p->reclaim_state = &reclaim_state; -- cgit v1.2.3