Re: [PATCH 0/5] make slab gfp fair

[Christoph Lameter]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> > So its no use on NUMA?
> 
> It is, its just that we're swapping very heavily at that point, a
> bouncing cache-line will not significantly slow down the box compared to
> waiting for block IO, will it?

How does all of this interact with

1. cpusets

2. dma allocations and highmem?

3. Containers?

> > The problem here is that you may spinlock and take out the slab for one 
> > cpu but then (AFAICT) other cpus can still not get their high priority 
> > allocs satisfied. Some comments follow.
> 
> All cpus are redirected to ->reserve_slab when the regular allocations
> start to fail.

And the reserve slab is refilled from page allocator reserves if needed?

> > But this is only working if we are using the slab after
> > explicitly flushing the cpuslabs. Otherwise the slab may be full and we
> > get to alloc_slab.
> 
> /me fails to parse.

s->cpu[cpu] is only NULL if the cpu slab was flushed. This is a pretty 
rare case likely not worth checking.

 
> > Remove the above two lines (they are wrong regardless) and simply make 
> > this the cpu slab.
> 
> It need not be the same node; the reserve_slab is node agnostic.
> So here the free page watermarks are good again, and we can forget all
> about the ->reserve_slab. We just push it on the free/partial lists and
> forget about it.
> 
> But like you said above: unfreeze_slab() should be good, since I don't
> use the lockless_freelist.

You could completely bypass the regular allocation functions and do

object = s->reserve_slab->freelist;
s->reserve_slab->freelist = object[s->reserve_slab->offset];

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