[PATCH 0/5] fold per-CPU vmstats remotely

[Marcelo Tosatti]

This patch series addresses the following two problems:

    1. A customer provided some evidence which indicates that
       the idle tick was stopped; albeit, CPU-specific vmstat
       counters still remained populated.

       Thus one can only assume quiet_vmstat() was not
       invoked on return to the idle loop. If I understand
       correctly, I suspect this divergence might erroneously
       prevent a reclaim attempt by kswapd. If the number of
       zone specific free pages are below their per-cpu drift
       value then zone_page_state_snapshot() is used to
       compute a more accurate view of the aforementioned
       statistic.  Thus any task blocked on the NUMA node
       specific pfmemalloc_wait queue will be unable to make
       significant progress via direct reclaim unless it is
       killed after being woken up by kswapd
       (see throttle_direct_reclaim())

    2. With a SCHED_FIFO task that busy loops on a given CPU,
       and kworker for that CPU at SCHED_OTHER priority,
       queuing work to sync per-vmstats will either cause that
       work to never execute, or stalld (i.e. stall daemon)
       boosts kworker priority which causes a latency
       violation

By having vmstat_shepherd flush the per-CPU counters to the
global counters from remote CPUs.

This is done using cmpxchg to manipulate the counters,
both CPU locally (via the account functions),
and remotely (via cpu_vm_stats_fold).

Thanks to Aaron Tomlin for diagnosing issue 1 and writing
the initial patch series.

 include/linux/mmzone.h |    3 
 mm/vmstat.c            |  424 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------------------------------------
 2 files changed, 230 insertions(+), 197 deletions(-)