<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/include/linux/vm_event_item.h, branch dev-4.7</title>
<subtitle>Intel OpenBMC Linux kernel source tree (mirror)</subtitle>
<id>https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/atom?h=dev-4.7</id>
<link rel='self' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/atom?h=dev-4.7'/>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/'/>
<updated>2016-03-17T22:09:34+00:00</updated>
<entry>
<title>thp, vmstats: count deferred split events</title>
<updated>2016-03-17T22:09:34+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Kirill A. Shutemov</name>
<email>kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-03-17T21:18:45+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=f9719a03de51e13526d614e79d002f838770b2d6'/>
<id>urn:sha1:f9719a03de51e13526d614e79d002f838770b2d6</id>
<content type='text'>
Count how many times we put a THP in split queue.  Currently, it happens
on partial unmap of a THP.

Rapidly growing value can indicate that an application behaves
unfriendly wrt THP: often fault in huge page and then unmap part of it.
This leads to unnecessary memory fragmentation and the application may
require tuning.

The event also can help with debugging kernel [mis-]behaviour.

Signed-off-by: Kirill A. Shutemov &lt;kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com&gt;
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli &lt;aarcange@redhat.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>mm, compaction: introduce kcompactd</title>
<updated>2016-03-17T22:09:34+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Vlastimil Babka</name>
<email>vbabka@suse.cz</email>
</author>
<published>2016-03-17T21:18:08+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=698b1b30642f1ff0ea10ef1de9745ab633031377'/>
<id>urn:sha1:698b1b30642f1ff0ea10ef1de9745ab633031377</id>
<content type='text'>
Memory compaction can be currently performed in several contexts:

 - kswapd balancing a zone after a high-order allocation failure
 - direct compaction to satisfy a high-order allocation, including THP
   page fault attemps
 - khugepaged trying to collapse a hugepage
 - manually from /proc

The purpose of compaction is two-fold.  The obvious purpose is to
satisfy a (pending or future) high-order allocation, and is easy to
evaluate.  The other purpose is to keep overal memory fragmentation low
and help the anti-fragmentation mechanism.  The success wrt the latter
purpose is more

The current situation wrt the purposes has a few drawbacks:

 - compaction is invoked only when a high-order page or hugepage is not
   available (or manually).  This might be too late for the purposes of
   keeping memory fragmentation low.
 - direct compaction increases latency of allocations.  Again, it would
   be better if compaction was performed asynchronously to keep
   fragmentation low, before the allocation itself comes.
 - (a special case of the previous) the cost of compaction during THP
   page faults can easily offset the benefits of THP.
 - kswapd compaction appears to be complex, fragile and not working in
   some scenarios.  It could also end up compacting for a high-order
   allocation request when it should be reclaiming memory for a later
   order-0 request.

To improve the situation, we should be able to benefit from an
equivalent of kswapd, but for compaction - i.e. a background thread
which responds to fragmentation and the need for high-order allocations
(including hugepages) somewhat proactively.

One possibility is to extend the responsibilities of kswapd, which could
however complicate its design too much.  It should be better to let
kswapd handle reclaim, as order-0 allocations are often more critical
than high-order ones.

Another possibility is to extend khugepaged, but this kthread is a
single instance and tied to THP configs.

This patch goes with the option of a new set of per-node kthreads called
kcompactd, and lays the foundations, without introducing any new
tunables.  The lifecycle mimics kswapd kthreads, including the memory
hotplug hooks.

For compaction, kcompactd uses the standard compaction_suitable() and
ompact_finished() criteria and the deferred compaction functionality.
Unlike direct compaction, it uses only sync compaction, as there's no
allocation latency to minimize.

This patch doesn't yet add a call to wakeup_kcompactd.  The kswapd
compact/reclaim loop for high-order pages will be replaced by waking up
kcompactd in the next patch with the description of what's wrong with
the old approach.

Waking up of the kcompactd threads is also tied to kswapd activity and
follows these rules:
 - we don't want to affect any fastpaths, so wake up kcompactd only from
   the slowpath, as it's done for kswapd
 - if kswapd is doing reclaim, it's more important than compaction, so
   don't invoke kcompactd until kswapd goes to sleep
 - the target order used for kswapd is passed to kcompactd

Future possible future uses for kcompactd include the ability to wake up
kcompactd on demand in special situations, such as when hugepages are
not available (currently not done due to __GFP_NO_KSWAPD) or when a
fragmentation event (i.e.  __rmqueue_fallback()) occurs.  It's also
possible to perform periodic compaction with kcompactd.

[arnd@arndb.de: fix build errors with kcompactd]
[paul.gortmaker@windriver.com: don't use modular references for non modular code]
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka &lt;vbabka@suse.cz&gt;
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli &lt;aarcange@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" &lt;kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com&gt;
Cc: Rik van Riel &lt;riel@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Joonsoo Kim &lt;iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com&gt;
Cc: Mel Gorman &lt;mgorman@techsingularity.net&gt;
Cc: David Rientjes &lt;rientjes@google.com&gt;
Cc: Michal Hocko &lt;mhocko@suse.com&gt;
Cc: Johannes Weiner &lt;hannes@cmpxchg.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann &lt;arnd@arndb.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker &lt;paul.gortmaker@windriver.com&gt;
Cc: Hugh Dickins &lt;hughd@google.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>mm: support madvise(MADV_FREE)</title>
<updated>2016-01-16T01:56:32+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Minchan Kim</name>
<email>minchan@kernel.org</email>
</author>
<published>2016-01-16T00:54:53+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=854e9ed09dedf0c19ac8640e91bcc74bc3f9e5c9'/>
<id>urn:sha1:854e9ed09dedf0c19ac8640e91bcc74bc3f9e5c9</id>
<content type='text'>
Linux doesn't have an ability to free pages lazy while other OS already
have been supported that named by madvise(MADV_FREE).

The gain is clear that kernel can discard freed pages rather than
swapping out or OOM if memory pressure happens.

Without memory pressure, freed pages would be reused by userspace
without another additional overhead(ex, page fault + allocation +
zeroing).

Jason Evans said:

: Facebook has been using MAP_UNINITIALIZED
: (https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/18/308) in some of its applications for
: several years, but there are operational costs to maintaining this
: out-of-tree in our kernel and in jemalloc, and we are anxious to retire it
: in favor of MADV_FREE.  When we first enabled MAP_UNINITIALIZED it
: increased throughput for much of our workload by ~5%, and although the
: benefit has decreased using newer hardware and kernels, there is still
: enough benefit that we cannot reasonably retire it without a replacement.
:
: Aside from Facebook operations, there are numerous broadly used
: applications that would benefit from MADV_FREE.  The ones that immediately
: come to mind are redis, varnish, and MariaDB.  I don't have much insight
: into Android internals and development process, but I would hope to see
: MADV_FREE support eventually end up there as well to benefit applications
: linked with the integrated jemalloc.
:
: jemalloc will use MADV_FREE once it becomes available in the Linux kernel.
: In fact, jemalloc already uses MADV_FREE or equivalent everywhere it's
: available: *BSD, OS X, Windows, and Solaris -- every platform except Linux
: (and AIX, but I'm not sure it even compiles on AIX).  The lack of
: MADV_FREE on Linux forced me down a long series of increasingly
: sophisticated heuristics for madvise() volume reduction, and even so this
: remains a common performance issue for people using jemalloc on Linux.
: Please integrate MADV_FREE; many people will benefit substantially.

How it works:

When madvise syscall is called, VM clears dirty bit of ptes of the
range.  If memory pressure happens, VM checks dirty bit of page table
and if it found still "clean", it means it's a "lazyfree pages" so VM
could discard the page instead of swapping out.  Once there was store
operation for the page before VM peek a page to reclaim, dirty bit is
set so VM can swap out the page instead of discarding.

One thing we should notice is that basically, MADV_FREE relies on dirty
bit in page table entry to decide whether VM allows to discard the page
or not.  IOW, if page table entry includes marked dirty bit, VM
shouldn't discard the page.

However, as a example, if swap-in by read fault happens, page table
entry doesn't have dirty bit so MADV_FREE could discard the page
wrongly.

For avoiding the problem, MADV_FREE did more checks with PageDirty and
PageSwapCache.  It worked out because swapped-in page lives on swap
cache and since it is evicted from the swap cache, the page has PG_dirty
flag.  So both page flags check effectively prevent wrong discarding by
MADV_FREE.

However, a problem in above logic is that swapped-in page has PG_dirty
still after they are removed from swap cache so VM cannot consider the
page as freeable any more even if madvise_free is called in future.

Look at below example for detail.

    ptr = malloc();
    memset(ptr);
    ..
    ..
    .. heavy memory pressure so all of pages are swapped out
    ..
    ..
    var = *ptr; -&gt; a page swapped-in and could be removed from
                   swapcache. Then, page table doesn't mark
                   dirty bit and page descriptor includes PG_dirty
    ..
    ..
    madvise_free(ptr); -&gt; It doesn't clear PG_dirty of the page.
    ..
    ..
    ..
    .. heavy memory pressure again.
    .. In this time, VM cannot discard the page because the page
    .. has *PG_dirty*

To solve the problem, this patch clears PG_dirty if only the page is
owned exclusively by current process when madvise is called because
PG_dirty represents ptes's dirtiness in several processes so we could
clear it only if we own it exclusively.

Firstly, heavy users would be general allocators(ex, jemalloc, tcmalloc
and hope glibc supports it) and jemalloc/tcmalloc already have supported
the feature for other OS(ex, FreeBSD)

  barrios@blaptop:~/benchmark/ebizzy$ lscpu
  Architecture:          x86_64
  CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
  Byte Order:            Little Endian
  CPU(s):                12
  On-line CPU(s) list:   0-11
  Thread(s) per core:    1
  Core(s) per socket:    1
  Socket(s):             12
  NUMA node(s):          1
  Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
  CPU family:            6
  Model:                 2
  Stepping:              3
  CPU MHz:               3200.185
  BogoMIPS:              6400.53
  Virtualization:        VT-x
  Hypervisor vendor:     KVM
  Virtualization type:   full
  L1d cache:             32K
  L1i cache:             32K
  L2 cache:              4096K
  NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-11
  ebizzy benchmark(./ebizzy -S 10 -n 512)

  Higher avg is better.

   vanilla-jemalloc             MADV_free-jemalloc

  1 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:   2961.90                avg:  12069.70
  std:     71.96(2.43%)         std:    186.68(1.55%)
  max:   3070.00                max:  12385.00
  min:   2796.00                min:  11746.00

  2 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:   5020.00                avg:  17827.00
  std:    264.87(5.28%)         std:    358.52(2.01%)
  max:   5244.00                max:  18760.00
  min:   4251.00                min:  17382.00

  4 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:   8988.80                avg:  27930.80
  std:   1175.33(13.08%)        std:   3317.33(11.88%)
  max:   9508.00                max:  30879.00
  min:   5477.00                min:  21024.00

  8 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:  13036.50                avg:  33739.40
  std:    170.67(1.31%)         std:   5146.22(15.25%)
  max:  13371.00                max:  40572.00
  min:  12785.00                min:  24088.00

  16 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:  11092.40                avg:  31424.20
  std:    710.60(6.41%)         std:   3763.89(11.98%)
  max:  12446.00                max:  36635.00
  min:   9949.00                min:  25669.00

  32 thread
  records: 10                   records: 10
  avg:  11067.00                avg:  34495.80
  std:    971.06(8.77%)         std:   2721.36(7.89%)
  max:  12010.00                max:  38598.00
  min:   9002.00                min:  30636.00

In summary, MADV_FREE is about much faster than MADV_DONTNEED.

This patch (of 12):

Add core MADV_FREE implementation.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: small cleanups]
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim &lt;minchan@kernel.org&gt;
Acked-by: Michal Hocko &lt;mhocko@suse.com&gt;
Acked-by: Hugh Dickins &lt;hughd@google.com&gt;
Cc: Mika Penttil &lt;mika.penttila@nextfour.com&gt;
Cc: Michael Kerrisk &lt;mtk.manpages@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Johannes Weiner &lt;hannes@cmpxchg.org&gt;
Cc: Rik van Riel &lt;riel@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Mel Gorman &lt;mgorman@suse.de&gt;
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro &lt;kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com&gt;
Cc: Jason Evans &lt;je@fb.com&gt;
Cc: Daniel Micay &lt;danielmicay@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" &lt;kirill@shutemov.name&gt;
Cc: Shaohua Li &lt;shli@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: &lt;yalin.wang2010@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@amacapital.net&gt;
Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" &lt;jejb@parisc-linux.org&gt;
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" &lt;kirill@shutemov.name&gt;
Cc: "Shaohua Li" &lt;shli@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli &lt;aarcange@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Arnd Bergmann &lt;arnd@arndb.de&gt;
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt &lt;benh@kernel.crashing.org&gt;
Cc: Catalin Marinas &lt;catalin.marinas@arm.com&gt;
Cc: Chen Gang &lt;gang.chen.5i5j@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Chris Zankel &lt;chris@zankel.net&gt;
Cc: Darrick J. Wong &lt;darrick.wong@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: David S. Miller &lt;davem@davemloft.net&gt;
Cc: Helge Deller &lt;deller@gmx.de&gt;
Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky &lt;ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru&gt;
Cc: Matt Turner &lt;mattst88@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Max Filippov &lt;jcmvbkbc@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Ralf Baechle &lt;ralf@linux-mips.org&gt;
Cc: Richard Henderson &lt;rth@twiddle.net&gt;
Cc: Roland Dreier &lt;roland@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Russell King &lt;rmk@arm.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: Shaohua Li &lt;shli@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Will Deacon &lt;will.deacon@arm.com&gt;
Cc: Wu Fengguang &lt;fengguang.wu@intel.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>mm, vmstats: new THP splitting event</title>
<updated>2016-01-16T01:56:32+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Kirill A. Shutemov</name>
<email>kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-01-16T00:52:46+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=122afea9626ab3f717b250a8dd3d5ebf57cdb56c'/>
<id>urn:sha1:122afea9626ab3f717b250a8dd3d5ebf57cdb56c</id>
<content type='text'>
The patch replaces THP_SPLIT with tree events: THP_SPLIT_PAGE,
THP_SPLIT_PAGE_FAILED and THP_SPLIT_PMD.  It reflects the fact that we
are going to be able split PMD without the compound page and that
split_huge_page() can fail.

Signed-off-by: Kirill A.  Shutemov &lt;kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com&gt;
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter &lt;cl@linux.com&gt;
Tested-by: Sasha Levin &lt;sasha.levin@oracle.com&gt;
Tested-by: Aneesh Kumar K.V &lt;aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com&gt;
Acked-by: Jerome Marchand &lt;jmarchan@redhat.com&gt;
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka &lt;vbabka@suse.cz&gt;
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli &lt;aarcange@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Hugh Dickins &lt;hughd@google.com&gt;
Cc: Dave Hansen &lt;dave.hansen@intel.com&gt;
Cc: Mel Gorman &lt;mgorman@suse.de&gt;
Cc: Rik van Riel &lt;riel@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi &lt;n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com&gt;
Cc: Steve Capper &lt;steve.capper@linaro.org&gt;
Cc: Johannes Weiner &lt;hannes@cmpxchg.org&gt;
Cc: Michal Hocko &lt;mhocko@suse.cz&gt;
Cc: David Rientjes &lt;rientjes@google.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>include/linux/vm_event_item.h: change HIGHMEM_ZONE macro definition</title>
<updated>2015-11-06T03:34:48+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>yalin wang</name>
<email>yalin.wang2010@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2015-11-06T02:48:50+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=f7ae3a95eab4e6766768cef664d2d429f53bd5f4'/>
<id>urn:sha1:f7ae3a95eab4e6766768cef664d2d429f53bd5f4</id>
<content type='text'>
Change HIGHMEM_ZONE to be the same as the DMA_ZONE macro.

Signed-off-by: yalin wang &lt;yalin.wang2010@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>mm,vmacache: count number of system-wide flushes</title>
<updated>2014-12-13T20:42:48+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Davidlohr Bueso</name>
<email>dave@stgolabs.net</email>
</author>
<published>2014-12-13T00:56:10+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=f5f302e21257ebb0c074bbafc37606c26d28cc3d'/>
<id>urn:sha1:f5f302e21257ebb0c074bbafc37606c26d28cc3d</id>
<content type='text'>
These flushes deal with sequence number overflows, such as for long lived
threads.  These are rare, but interesting from a debugging PoV.  As such,
display the number of flushes when vmacache debugging is enabled.

Signed-off-by: Davidlohr Bueso &lt;dbueso@suse.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>mm/balloon_compaction: add vmstat counters and kpageflags bit</title>
<updated>2014-10-10T02:26:01+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Konstantin Khlebnikov</name>
<email>k.khlebnikov@samsung.com</email>
</author>
<published>2014-10-09T22:29:32+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=09316c09dde33aae14f34489d9e3d243ec0d5938'/>
<id>urn:sha1:09316c09dde33aae14f34489d9e3d243ec0d5938</id>
<content type='text'>
Always mark pages with PageBalloon even if balloon compaction is disabled
and expose this mark in /proc/kpageflags as KPF_BALLOON.

Also this patch adds three counters into /proc/vmstat: "balloon_inflate",
"balloon_deflate" and "balloon_migrate".  They accumulate balloon
activity.  Current size of balloon is (balloon_inflate - balloon_deflate)
pages.

All generic balloon code now gathered under option CONFIG_MEMORY_BALLOON.
It should be selected by ballooning driver which wants use this feature.
Currently virtio-balloon is the only user.

Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov &lt;k.khlebnikov@samsung.com&gt;
Cc: Rafael Aquini &lt;aquini@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin &lt;ryabinin.a.a@gmail.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>mm,vmacache: add debug data</title>
<updated>2014-06-04T23:53:57+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Davidlohr Bueso</name>
<email>davidlohr@hp.com</email>
</author>
<published>2014-06-04T23:06:46+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=4f115147ff802267d0aa41e361c5aa5bd933d896'/>
<id>urn:sha1:4f115147ff802267d0aa41e361c5aa5bd933d896</id>
<content type='text'>
Introduce a CONFIG_DEBUG_VM_VMACACHE option to enable counting the cache
hit rate -- exported in /proc/vmstat.

Any updates to the caching scheme needs this kind of data, thus it can
save some work re-implementing the counting all the time.

Signed-off-by: Davidlohr Bueso &lt;davidlohr@hp.com&gt;
Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran &lt;aswin@hp.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>drop_caches: add some documentation and info message</title>
<updated>2014-04-03T23:21:04+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Dave Hansen</name>
<email>dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com</email>
</author>
<published>2014-04-03T21:48:19+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.radix-linux.su/BMC/Intel-BMC/linux.git/commit/?id=5509a5d27b971a90b940e148ca9ca53312e4fa7a'/>
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There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and a load of blog posts
suggesting that using "drop_caches" periodically keeps your system
running in "tip top shape".  Perhaps adding some kernel documentation
will increase the amount of accurate data on its use.

If we are not shrinking caches effectively, then we have real bugs.
Using drop_caches will simply mask the bugs and make them harder to
find, but certainly does not fix them, nor is it an appropriate
"workaround" to limit the size of the caches.  On the contrary, there
have been bug reports on issues that turned out to be misguided use of
cache dropping.

Dropping caches is a very drastic and disruptive operation that is good
for debugging and running tests, but if it creates bug reports from
production use, kernel developers should be aware of its use.

Add a bit more documentation about it, a syslog message to track down
abusers, and vmstat drop counters to help analyze problem reports.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: checkpatch fixes]
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: add runtime suppression control]
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen &lt;dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko &lt;mhocko@suse.cz&gt;
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro &lt;kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com&gt;
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki &lt;kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner &lt;hannes@cmpxchg.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
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<entry>
<title>mm, x86: Account for TLB flushes only when debugging</title>
<updated>2014-01-25T08:10:41+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Mel Gorman</name>
<email>mgorman@suse.de</email>
</author>
<published>2014-01-21T22:33:16+00:00</published>
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Bisection between 3.11 and 3.12 fingered commit 9824cf97 ("mm:
vmstats: tlb flush counters") to cause overhead problems.

The counters are undeniably useful but how often do we really
need to debug TLB flush related issues?  It does not justify
taking the penalty everywhere so make it a debugging option.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman &lt;mgorman@suse.de&gt;
Tested-by: Davidlohr Bueso &lt;davidlohr@hp.com&gt;
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel &lt;riel@redhat.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: Hugh Dickins &lt;hughd@google.com&gt;
Cc: Alex Shi &lt;alex.shi@linaro.org&gt;
Cc: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: Peter Zijlstra &lt;peterz@infradead.org&gt;
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-XzxjntugxuwpxXhcrxqqh53b@git.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar &lt;mingo@kernel.org&gt;
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