On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 9:07 PM, Davide Italiano
<davide.itali...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hi.
> I'm a student and some time ago I started investigating a bit about
> the performance/fragmentation issue of large allocations within the
> UMA allocator.
> Benckmarks showed up that this problems of performances are mainly
> related to the fact that every call to uma_large_malloc() results in a
> call to kmem_malloc(), and this behaviour is really inefficient.
>
> I started doing some work. Here's somethin:
> First of all, I tried to define larger zones and let uma do it all as
> a first step.
> UMA can allocate slabs of more than one page. So I tried to define
> zones of 1,2,4,8 pages, moving ZMEM_KMAX up.
> I tested the solution w/ raidtest. Here there are some numbers.
>
> Here's the workload characterization:
>
>
> set mediasize=`diskinfo /dev/zvol/tank/vol | awk '{print $3}'`
> set sectorsize=`diskinfo /dev/zvol/tank/vol | awk '{print $2}'`
> raidtest genfile -s $mediasize -S $sectorsize -n 50000
>
> # $mediasize = 10737418240
> # $sectorsize = 512
>
> Number of READ requests: 24924
> Number of WRITE requests: 25076
> Numbers of bytes to transmit: 3305292800
>
>
> raidtest test -d /dev/zvol/tank/vol -n 4
> ## tested using 4 cores, 1.5 GB Ram
>
> Results:
> Number of processes: 4
> Bytes per second: 10146896
> Requests per second: 153
>
> Results: (4* PAGE_SIZE)
> Number of processes: 4
> Bytes per second: 14793969
> Requests per second: 223
>
> Results: (8* PAGE_SIZE)
> Number of processes: 4
> Bytes per second: 6855779
> Requests per second: 103
>
>
> The result of this tests is that defining larger zones is useful until
> the size of these zones is not too big. After some size, performances
> decreases significantly.
>
> As second step, alc@ proposed to create a new layer that sits between
> UMA and the VM subsystem. This layer can manage a pool of chunk that
> can be used to satisfy requests from uma_large_malloc so avoiding the
> overhead due to kmem_malloc() calls.
>
> I've recently started developing a patch (not yet full working) that
> implements this layer. First of all I'd like to concentrate my
> attention to the performance problem rather than the fragmentation
> one. So the patch that actually started to write doesn't care about
> fragmentation aspects.
>
> http://davit.altervista.org/uma_large_allocations.patch
>
> There are some questions to which I wasn't able to answer (for
> example, when it's safe to call kmem_malloc() to request memory).
>
>
In this context, there is really only one restriction. Your
page_alloc_new() should never call kmem_malloc() with M_WAITOK if your
bitmap_mtx lock is held. It may only call kmem_malloc() with M_NOWAIT if
your bitmap_mtx lock is held.
That said, I would try to structure the code so that you're not doing any
kmem_malloc() calls with the bitmap_mtx lock held.
So, at the end of the day I'm asking for your opinion about this issue
> and I'm looking for a "mentor" (some kind of guidance) to continue
> this project. If someone is interested to help, it would be very
> appreciated.
>
>
I will take a closer look at your patch later today, and send you comments.
Alan
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