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Linus Torvalds 3510ca20ec Minor page waitqueue cleanups
Tim Chen and Kan Liang have been battling a customer load that shows
extremely long page wakeup lists.  The cause seems to be constant NUMA
migration of a hot page that is shared across a lot of threads, but the
actual root cause for the exact behavior has not been found.

Tim has a patch that batches the wait list traversal at wakeup time, so
that we at least don't get long uninterruptible cases where we traverse
and wake up thousands of processes and get nasty latency spikes.  That
is likely 4.14 material, but we're still discussing the page waitqueue
specific parts of it.

In the meantime, I've tried to look at making the page wait queues less
expensive, and failing miserably.  If you have thousands of threads
waiting for the same page, it will be painful.  We'll need to try to
figure out the NUMA balancing issue some day, in addition to avoiding
the excessive spinlock hold times.

That said, having tried to rewrite the page wait queues, I can at least
fix up some of the braindamage in the current situation. In particular:

 (a) we don't want to continue walking the page wait list if the bit
     we're waiting for already got set again (which seems to be one of
     the patterns of the bad load).  That makes no progress and just
     causes pointless cache pollution chasing the pointers.

 (b) we don't want to put the non-locking waiters always on the front of
     the queue, and the locking waiters always on the back.  Not only is
     that unfair, it means that we wake up thousands of reading threads
     that will just end up being blocked by the writer later anyway.

Also add a comment about the layout of 'struct wait_page_key' - there is
an external user of it in the cachefiles code that means that it has to
match the layout of 'struct wait_bit_key' in the two first members.  It
so happens to match, because 'struct page *' and 'unsigned long *' end
up having the same values simply because the page flags are the first
member in struct page.

Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Kan Liang <kan.liang@intel.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2017-08-27 13:55:12 -07:00
arch Merge branch 'x86-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-08-26 09:06:28 -07:00
block blk-mq-debugfs: Add names for recently added flags 2017-08-25 08:07:44 -06:00
certs modsign: add markers to endif-statements in certs/Makefile 2017-07-14 11:01:37 +10:00
crypto crypto: authencesn - Fix digest_null crash 2017-07-18 17:01:11 +08:00
Documentation Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2017-08-21 13:16:27 -07:00
drivers Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dtor/input 2017-08-26 12:48:29 -07:00
firmware firmware/Makefile: force recompilation if makefile changes 2017-05-08 17:15:10 -07:00
fs Merge branch 'akpm' (patches from Andrew) 2017-08-25 18:02:27 -07:00
include Clarify (and fix) MAX_LFS_FILESIZE macros 2017-08-27 12:12:25 -07:00
init random: do not ignore early device randomness 2017-07-12 16:26:00 -07:00
ipc ipc: add missing container_of()s for randstruct 2017-08-02 17:16:12 -07:00
kernel Minor page waitqueue cleanups 2017-08-27 13:55:12 -07:00
lib kernel/watchdog: Prevent false positives with turbo modes 2017-08-18 12:35:02 +02:00
mm Minor page waitqueue cleanups 2017-08-27 13:55:12 -07:00
net Two nfsd bugfixes, neither 4.13 regressions, but both potentially 2017-08-25 17:27:26 -07:00
samples samples/bpf: fix bpf tunnel cleanup 2017-07-31 22:02:47 -07:00
scripts Kbuild fixes for v4.13 2017-08-24 14:22:27 -07:00
security Now that IPC and other changes have landed, enable manual markings for 2017-07-19 08:55:18 -07:00
sound ASoC: rt5677: Reintroduce I2C device IDs 2017-08-24 18:04:29 +02:00
tools Merge branch 'x86-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-08-26 09:06:28 -07:00
usr ramfs: clarify help text that compression applies to ramfs as well as legacy ramdisk. 2017-07-06 16:24:30 -07:00
virt KVM/ARM Fixes for v4.13-rc4 2017-08-03 17:59:58 +02:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore Add hch to .get_maintainer.ignore 2015-08-21 14:30:10 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set git diff driver for C source code files 2016-10-07 18:46:30 -07:00
.gitignore kbuild: Add support to generate LLVM assembly files 2017-04-25 08:13:52 +09:00
.mailmap power supply and reset changes for the v4.12 series (part 2) 2017-05-12 12:02:21 -07:00
COPYING
CREDITS avr32: remove support for AVR32 architecture 2017-05-01 09:27:15 +02:00
Kbuild kbuild: Consolidate header generation from ASM offset information 2017-04-13 05:43:37 +09:00
Kconfig kbuild: migrate all arch to the kconfig mainmenu upgrade 2010-09-19 22:54:11 -04:00
MAINTAINERS Merge branch 'irq-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-08-20 09:07:56 -07:00
Makefile Kbuild fixes for v4.13 2017-08-24 14:22:27 -07:00
README README: add a new README file, pointing to the Documentation/ 2016-10-24 08:12:35 -02:00

Linux kernel
============

This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst

Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users.
These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.