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authorIan Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>2010-02-17 10:38:10 +0000
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>2010-02-25 10:28:19 +0100
commit14315592009c17035cac81f4954d5a1f4d71e489 (patch)
tree2e67453497e0b0ba08be2aeafe971430a5a28f67 /arch/x86/mm
parente808bae2407a087bfd40200a27587898e5a9909d (diff)
x86, mm: Allow highmem user page tables to be disabled at boot time
Distros generally (I looked at Debian, RHEL5 and SLES11) seem to enable CONFIG_HIGHPTE for any x86 configuration which has highmem enabled. This means that the overhead applies even to machines which have a fairly modest amount of high memory and which therefore do not really benefit from allocating PTEs in high memory but still pay the price of the additional mapping operations. Running kernbench on a 4G box I found that with CONFIG_HIGHPTE=y but no actual highptes being allocated there was a reduction in system time used from 59.737s to 55.9s. With CONFIG_HIGHPTE=y and highmem PTEs being allocated: Average Optimal load -j 4 Run (std deviation): Elapsed Time 175.396 (0.238914) User Time 515.983 (5.85019) System Time 59.737 (1.26727) Percent CPU 263.8 (71.6796) Context Switches 39989.7 (4672.64) Sleeps 42617.7 (246.307) With CONFIG_HIGHPTE=y but with no highmem PTEs being allocated: Average Optimal load -j 4 Run (std deviation): Elapsed Time 174.278 (0.831968) User Time 515.659 (6.07012) System Time 55.9 (1.07799) Percent CPU 263.8 (71.266) Context Switches 39929.6 (4485.13) Sleeps 42583.7 (373.039) This patch allows the user to control the allocation of PTEs in highmem from the command line ("userpte=nohigh") but retains the status-quo as the default. It is possible that some simple heuristic could be developed which allows auto-tuning of this option however I don't have a sufficiently large machine available to me to perform any particularly meaningful experiments. We could probably handwave up an argument for a threshold at 16G of total RAM. Assuming 768M of lowmem we have 196608 potential lowmem PTE pages. Each page can map 2M of RAM in a PAE-enabled configuration, meaning a maximum of 384G of RAM could potentially be mapped using lowmem PTEs. Even allowing generous factor of 10 to account for other required lowmem allocations, generous slop to account for page sharing (which reduces the total amount of RAM mappable by a given number of PT pages) and other innacuracies in the estimations it would seem that even a 32G machine would not have a particularly pressing need for highmem PTEs. I think 32G could be considered to be at the upper bound of what might be sensible on a 32 bit machine (although I think in practice 64G is still supported). It's seems questionable if HIGHPTE is even a win for any amount of RAM you would sensibly run a 32 bit kernel on rather than going 64 bit. Signed-off-by: Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com> LKML-Reference: <1266403090-20162-1-git-send-email-ian.campbell@citrix.com> Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'arch/x86/mm')
-rw-r--r--arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c31
1 files changed, 26 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c b/arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c
index ed34f5e3599..c9ba9deafe8 100644
--- a/arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/pgtable.c
@@ -6,6 +6,14 @@
#define PGALLOC_GFP GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOTRACK | __GFP_REPEAT | __GFP_ZERO
+#ifdef CONFIG_HIGHPTE
+#define PGALLOC_USER_GFP __GFP_HIGHMEM
+#else
+#define PGALLOC_USER_GFP 0
+#endif
+
+gfp_t __userpte_alloc_gfp = PGALLOC_GFP | PGALLOC_USER_GFP;
+
pte_t *pte_alloc_one_kernel(struct mm_struct *mm, unsigned long address)
{
return (pte_t *)__get_free_page(PGALLOC_GFP);
@@ -15,16 +23,29 @@ pgtable_t pte_alloc_one(struct mm_struct *mm, unsigned long address)
{
struct page *pte;
-#ifdef CONFIG_HIGHPTE
- pte = alloc_pages(PGALLOC_GFP | __GFP_HIGHMEM, 0);
-#else
- pte = alloc_pages(PGALLOC_GFP, 0);
-#endif
+ pte = alloc_pages(__userpte_alloc_gfp, 0);
if (pte)
pgtable_page_ctor(pte);
return pte;
}
+static int __init setup_userpte(char *arg)
+{
+ if (!arg)
+ return -EINVAL;
+
+ /*
+ * "userpte=nohigh" disables allocation of user pagetables in
+ * high memory.
+ */
+ if (strcmp(arg, "nohigh") == 0)
+ __userpte_alloc_gfp &= ~__GFP_HIGHMEM;
+ else
+ return -EINVAL;
+ return 0;
+}
+early_param("userpte", setup_userpte);
+
void ___pte_free_tlb(struct mmu_gather *tlb, struct page *pte)
{
pgtable_page_dtor(pte);