tree 3e4b1d2c2c4c783886f9c6e98770f4602273197c
parent f968ef1c55199301e98c28fe7dfa8ace05ecdb96
author Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> 1372888946 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1372892851 -0700

mm: add tracepoints for LRU activation and insertions

Andrew Perepechko reported a problem whereby pages are being prematurely
evicted as the mark_page_accessed() hint is ignored for pages that are
currently on a pagevec --
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-ext4/msg37340.html .

Alexey Lyahkov and Robin Dong have also reported problems recently that
could be due to hot pages reaching the end of the inactive list too
quickly and be reclaimed.

Rather than addressing this on a per-filesystem basis, this series aims
to fix the mark_page_accessed() interface by deferring what LRU a page
is added to pagevec drain time and allowing mark_page_accessed() to call
SetPageActive on a pagevec page.

Patch 1 adds two tracepoints for LRU page activation and insertion. Using
	these processes it's possible to build a model of pages in the
	LRU that can be processed offline.

Patch 2 defers making the decision on what LRU to add a page to until when
	the pagevec is drained.

Patch 3 searches the local pagevec for pages to mark PageActive on
	mark_page_accessed. The changelog explains why only the local
	pagevec is examined.

Patches 4 and 5 tidy up the API.

postmark, a dd-based test and fs-mark both single and threaded mode were
run but none of them showed any performance degradation or gain as a
result of the patch.

Using patch 1, I built a *very* basic model of the LRU to examine
offline what the average age of different page types on the LRU were in
milliseconds.  Of course, capturing the trace distorts the test as it's
written to local disk but it does not matter for the purposes of this
test.  The average age of pages in milliseconds were

				    vanilla deferdrain
Average age mapped anon:               1454       1250
Average age mapped file:             127841     155552
Average age unmapped anon:               85        235
Average age unmapped file:            73633      38884
Average age unmapped buffers:         74054     116155

The LRU activity was mostly files which you'd expect for a dd-based
workload.  Note that the average age of buffer pages is increased by the
series and it is expected this is due to the fact that the buffer pages
are now getting added to the active list when drained from the pagevecs.
Note that the average age of the unmapped file data is decreased as they
are still added to the inactive list and are reclaimed before the
buffers.

There is no guarantee this is a universal win for all workloads and it
would be nice if the filesystem people gave some thought as to whether
this decision is generally a win or a loss.

This patch:

Using these tracepoints it is possible to model LRU activity and the
average residency of pages of different types.  This can be used to
debug problems related to premature reclaim of pages of particular
types.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Alexey Lyahkov <alexey.lyashkov@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrew Perepechko <anserper@ya.ru>
Cc: Robin Dong <sanbai@taobao.com>
Cc: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Bernd Schubert <bernd.schubert@fastmail.fm>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>