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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/vm/ksm.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/vm/ksm.txt | 63 |
1 files changed, 63 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt index 6b0ca7feb135..6686bd267dc9 100644 --- a/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt +++ b/Documentation/vm/ksm.txt @@ -98,6 +98,50 @@ use_zero_pages - specifies whether empty pages (i.e. allocated pages it is only effective for pages merged after the change. Default: 0 (normal KSM behaviour as in earlier releases) +max_page_sharing - Maximum sharing allowed for each KSM page. This + enforces a deduplication limit to avoid the virtual + memory rmap lists to grow too large. The minimum + value is 2 as a newly created KSM page will have at + least two sharers. The rmap walk has O(N) + complexity where N is the number of rmap_items + (i.e. virtual mappings) that are sharing the page, + which is in turn capped by max_page_sharing. So + this effectively spread the the linear O(N) + computational complexity from rmap walk context + over different KSM pages. The ksmd walk over the + stable_node "chains" is also O(N), but N is the + number of stable_node "dups", not the number of + rmap_items, so it has not a significant impact on + ksmd performance. In practice the best stable_node + "dup" candidate will be kept and found at the head + of the "dups" list. The higher this value the + faster KSM will merge the memory (because there + will be fewer stable_node dups queued into the + stable_node chain->hlist to check for pruning) and + the higher the deduplication factor will be, but + the slowest the worst case rmap walk could be for + any given KSM page. Slowing down the rmap_walk + means there will be higher latency for certain + virtual memory operations happening during + swapping, compaction, NUMA balancing and page + migration, in turn decreasing responsiveness for + the caller of those virtual memory operations. The + scheduler latency of other tasks not involved with + the VM operations doing the rmap walk is not + affected by this parameter as the rmap walks are + always schedule friendly themselves. + +stable_node_chains_prune_millisecs - How frequently to walk the whole + list of stable_node "dups" linked in the + stable_node "chains" in order to prune stale + stable_nodes. Smaller milllisecs values will free + up the KSM metadata with lower latency, but they + will make ksmd use more CPU during the scan. This + only applies to the stable_node chains so it's a + noop if not a single KSM page hit the + max_page_sharing yet (there would be no stable_node + chains in such case). + The effectiveness of KSM and MADV_MERGEABLE is shown in /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/: pages_shared - how many shared pages are being used @@ -106,10 +150,29 @@ pages_unshared - how many pages unique but repeatedly checked for merging pages_volatile - how many pages changing too fast to be placed in a tree full_scans - how many times all mergeable areas have been scanned +stable_node_chains - number of stable node chains allocated, this is + effectively the number of KSM pages that hit the + max_page_sharing limit +stable_node_dups - number of stable node dups queued into the + stable_node chains + A high ratio of pages_sharing to pages_shared indicates good sharing, but a high ratio of pages_unshared to pages_sharing indicates wasted effort. pages_volatile embraces several different kinds of activity, but a high proportion there would also indicate poor use of madvise MADV_MERGEABLE. +The maximum possible page_sharing/page_shared ratio is limited by the +max_page_sharing tunable. To increase the ratio max_page_sharing must +be increased accordingly. + +The stable_node_dups/stable_node_chains ratio is also affected by the +max_page_sharing tunable, and an high ratio may indicate fragmentation +in the stable_node dups, which could be solved by introducing +fragmentation algorithms in ksmd which would refile rmap_items from +one stable_node dup to another stable_node dup, in order to freeup +stable_node "dups" with few rmap_items in them, but that may increase +the ksmd CPU usage and possibly slowdown the readonly computations on +the KSM pages of the applications. + Izik Eidus, Hugh Dickins, 17 Nov 2009 |